Why can’t I have wings?

Tuesday, 1 April, 2008

Dr Samuel Poore, a reconstructive surgeon, has an interesting article in The Journal of Hand Surgery about how to transform a human arm into a bird wing (why that would be a popular idea, I don’t know). Read the write-up at New Scientist if you don’t have journal privileges. He ends up concluding that it is too hard (at least if the wings were intended to facilitate flight), and ends with this advice:

Despite advances in surgical technique that could theoretically lead to the ability to construct wings from arms, it is evident that humans should remain human, staying on the ground pondering and studying the intricacies of flight while letting birds be birds and angels be angels.

Unfortunately, even though I read the whole article, I do not think it is at all ‘evident that humans should remain human’ (emphasis mine). Plus, I don’t want to. Poore provides some good reasons why we can’t yet build working wings out of our arms, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do if we one day can.

There are a few issues that I would raise regarding Poore’s reasons for not being able to give humans any wings:

1. Turning our arms into wings is not what most people would want.

Just look at Archangel from X-Men. Most fictional conceptions of flying humanoids have wings AND arms (except maybe harpies), because arms and hands are just so amazingly useful to human beings that I don’t see why anyone would want to give them up permanently for the mere advantage of flight.

2. What about bat wings? Or pterosaur wings, or even insect wings!

The article is titled ‘ The Morphological Basis of the Arm-to-Wing Transition’, but doesn’t look one of the three historical arm-to-wing transitions – that of the chiropterans (bats). Going down this road would overcome the problem which Poore considers the most difficult – how to give humans the ability to grow feathers. Being mammals, we have a skin structure that probably wouldn’t support feathers (though Poore did not consider the possibility of genetically modifying our skin, so that the areas supporting feathers would have avian-like skin structure). Plus, bats have clawed wings, so by increasing the number of digits on our hand, we might be able to have bat wings and still maintain some sort of ability to pick things up and manipulate objects. I don’t think people would mind looking more like gargoyles rather than angels, would they?

3. Forget about the trabeculae?

Bird, at least the big ones that fly, have rather hollow bones. Mammals have these hollows in their bones too, but not to the dramatic extent that birds do (a bird’s bone has a density of about 0.3g/cm3, whereas a human would average 1.5g/cm3). Bones are mostly air-filled, but reinforced by cross-beams known as trabeculae (Latin for ‘small beams’). This makes the bones of large flying birds extremely light. But Poore overlooks this when he states:

…for a 170-lb human to achieve any type of flight, he or she would need wings with approximately 20 square feet of surface area.

Any person seeking to achieve flight will likely seek hollow bones too, decreasing their weight (though not by much, because bones only represent ~15% of total body mass – so reducing bone weight by 80% will only reduce total body mass by 12%).

If wings are ever to be part of a future human being, the scientists of that age will probably also will look at avian lungs too, which are far more efficient for their size than mammalian lungs. This enables smaller avian lungs to do the same work as big mammalian lungs, will also reduce the weight of the body.

So, why can’t I have wings?
Basically, the reason why humans (probably) can’t ever have any functional wings is that we’re too big.

The power required to flap the wings enough to raise the body is the major roadblock in giving humans wings. Birds, bats and pterosaurs have very large pectoral muscles, (making up about 30-35% of their body mass), which powers their wings. If you think you’ve got enough muscle to flap wings, try doing a push-up and generating enough force to lift your body off the ground and imagine doing that repeatedly. Maybe you just want to glide? Well, lie on your stomach and spread your arms out as far as they can go, and push with your arms enough to raise your chest just off the ground (without bending at your elbows), and hold that position for as long as you can. To glide or fly, you have to use only your arms/wings to hold your entire bodyweight above the ground, such as in the gymnastic position known as the Maltese Cross. The human body is not adapted to this position, and only a few well-muscled gymnasts can hold it for any length of time.

This position is known as the Maltese Cross. You are not even strong enough to glide until you can hold this position.

The addition of the massive chest muscles that a human would require for sustained powered flight would add too much weight, which would necessitate increased wingspan and therefore increase the power needed to fly, thereby requiring more muscles…and so on. There is a point where you simply cannot get any more advantage by adding more muscle mass. But it’s not known what this upper limit is. Existing flying animals don’t get much bigger than 20kg (such as the Great Bustard), but some extinct animals might have been able to fly and were quite large, such as the ~85kg bird Argentavis and the 90-200kg pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus (and both of those animals are predicted to have been mostly soaring animals). Evolution has so far gone through at least three different pathways to sustained flight (birds, bats and pterosaurs), and proven sustained fliers all seem to have very strict constraints on body mass.

So because humans are at least three times heavier than a flying animal should be, maybe the ability for humans to fly will only be possible when we have bionic muscles of super-strength, that are lighter and stronger than biological muscle. Failing that, we could make humans two-thirds smaller. But small humans with large pectoral muscles – they’d look less like fairies and more like…well, birds.

As for wing size, Poore estimates a wing area of 20 square feet (1.85m2) for a 170lb (77kg) human. This seems surprisingly low, as Argentavis weighed about as much as a human but had a wing area of 7m2 (75 square feet) and a wingspan of up to 8m. But Argentavis had a relatively typical wing loading of 11.5kg/m2, and the maximum known for birds is 25kg/m2, so perhaps it could have done some very basic flight with wings half that size. Given his superhuman strength, Archangel’s 4-5m wingspan might be enough, but a better estimate would be almost around 7m for a winged human. But without the necessary pectoral muscles for powered flight, even 7m wings on a person would only be usable for gliding.

Anyway, I’m not saying it is impossible – a gliding human is probably possible (but far easier with a hang glider). But the important thing is, there is no reason I can see of why we shouldn’t try to give humans the ability to fly (and keep them looking mostly like humans). Many humans have wished they could fly, and I don’t see why we couldn’t allow them to grant that wish if it ever becomes possible. There’s nothing morally wrong with granting that wish.

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738 comments

I think that we could have wings big to fly and light enough to not be uncomfortable, but the way i imagined it would be that the wings themselves would have muscles in them and that they would be connected to the nervous system so that you can control them just like an arm or leg with practice. I souly believe that somebody in the world has tried to give a human wings in secret, i mean what with area 51 before it was properly discovered and scientists would have probably tried to

I know how u feel, the gov. has made cybertronic arms and legs that work just as good as any real leg, i think they can give us wings. the only reason they dont is because the want to restrict our freedom, to keep the citizens of america actually its citizens of america. Because if i could fly i wouldnt be a citezen of anything anymore, i would be a member of the sky people.

You idiots, who actually believe that. In order to make a pair of wings for a human that could actually fly, you would need:
An extremely lightweight material that is extremely strong (Aerogel, stronger than steel but as light as air)
Artificial muscles inside of the wings that are like the muscles in a birds wings
Neural interface with the user (Which is possible, and has been done before)
The only hard part of this is the artificial muscles.
The idea just doesn’t seem practical to the government, so they don’t try. But I do believe that someone is secretly trying to.

You and me both. To tell you the true, I have been researching on wingspans and human dna for a will. I beleive it can be done if done properly. You just need the right materials to do it and the nowlege (sorry for my spelling) to do so. Just to let you know. If you do enough research and experements with animals, then prity much everyone can do it.

Me too i would do almost anything to fly the maximum ride books is where i got the idea and im 12 and im hoping to splice bird genes with ours but somehow get only the wings and not the beak claws ect. im trying my hardest to get into a scientific collage and find my way into the method so i will soon be victorious with angel wings and our bird wing that are usable to fly just today i had a dream about me finding a potion or elixir to make me fly and the wings that i created were BEAUTIFUL they were the most magnificent things i had ever seen one day i will get my wings if it is the….LAST THING I EVER DO

in any case we already have light material and the gov wont give any one the ability to fly because if they gave citizens that ability to fly there would be chaos because of stupidity that already exist in the world

I would be willing to be a test subject if anyone wants to test the wings it would give me an opportunity to exoerience something so amazing in my life if it actually works I hope it would be done already really it would be awesome

I want wings so bad the only reason I want the fly is to be able to see everything around the world the only reason I got that idea of flying was reading all these animebooks all these manga and I’ve always wanted to fly since I read the first book that had people with wings which was Maximum Ride

I JUST WANT WINGS I DONT CARE ABOUT FLYING ANYMORE IF ITS SO IMMPOSSIBLE NOT FLYING WOULD BE BETTERRR FOR MY MENTAL STATE ANYWAY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! please check of Fang’s blog and read all 6 of the Maximum Ride books, its the best book on Earth and about 6 kids with wings please please PLEASE read them a 7 book is coming 2011 it also on fanfiction.net in humor it the BBBBBBBBEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTTTTTTT opps i ment best PLease read then im gnna go cry now

Read the Maximum Ride Series 5 times each! I was obsessed with growing wings people. If you can find a way to make/grow wing then plz contact me! There is a scientist who does do testing on humans and animals. They have made dogs fly why not us?!

I would do almost anything to get wings, maybe even let that doctor guy in New England try to graft wings onto me, except that if humans could fly.. well, then we would have to deal with all of this air traffic right? No one would use a car if they could fly. This could be good- WAY less car pollution, bus pollution, etc..- but, you would never be able to see the sky, unless you were up there, you know? And, humans already abuse the earth ENOUGH we are powerful ENOUGH to wipe out entire species… would this give us more than enough power? Humans are powerful enough without wings, and superhuman strength and stuff. If the world was really ending, like in the maximum ride series it would make sense.. but wouldn’t the world be better off without humans? All we do is destroy, yeah i know we make art- we invent stuff. Well, have you noticed that the stuff we invent can save lives-but only human ones, maybe a few animals hit by cars and such-it tends to hurt the earth! It is great that we can save lives, but we use up resources! We don’t even use up that much space, but we do use up resources. If we had wings, that would mean no more traffic pollution- cars, buses, planes,trains, etc.. but we still need electricity, right? And beef??? Cattle let out more, um, gas than all of the cars on the road- COMBINED. Maybe if we gave up milk, and beef the earth would be okay…. but until that, wings will not solve the problem, it may be one step in solving it, though.

If you really want wings, you would need bird genes inserted in early pregnancy. The Maxmimum Ride books state things they tell you what they need to live. And based on how large their wings are, Max says hers are 16 feet, she needs to be 5′ 8″

I WANT WINGS TO IT WOULD BE SO AWESOME TO FLY!!!!!!!!!!! just using your mind with practice like when you were little how you learned to ride a bike. even though i want wings i would want them to be able to be able to fold up so you could still fit through doors and stuff.

I despretly want wings….i think scientist gave me some once but they went back in time and took them back….well im gonna get them back and its gonna be soon. so all you out there,get ready for the big show.

i want wings so bad y can’t people have wings if there are people out there who can give me wings please do i will love to have wings i all ready have powers that no human has i can see in the dark i can run up to 10000 miles an hour i can make someones ears bleed when i bark if u want to know what i am i am a werwolf and they are real i should know i am one and vampiers are real to becouse my friend i a vampier and my cousin is a werwolf and so am i and i want wings and so does my friend we wish that we could fly high in the sky like birds if u could give use wings please do my code name is iggy and her code name is fang and i want white wings and she wants black wings and i am a girl and i want wings from: iggy and fang

That doesn’t really make sense, and it’s highly unlikely, but there’s possibly a tiny chance it’s true. I’m trying to learn about possible genetic mutations, so maybe I’ll tell you if I learn anything.

Well if the wings were connected like arms are then you would just move them as easy as arms right? Well I have been researching, they made a dog fly by extracting bird DNA and then putting it into a dogs nervous system. A few days later the dog sprouted wings and flew away. They hold that animal captive until it died. Why don’t we just use a needle and put bird DNA into our bodies? I know how to extract DNA. In a vile put blood or fluids from the bird, then add vinegar an clear soap. The DNA will float to the top. Collect that DNA into a needle and put it into the back of the animal/person. I haven’t tried it yet but once I catch a bird I sure am!

It is true that the wings themselves would have muscles of their own, but think of it this way. Birds have wings instead of arms, right? Or, no, let’s use a bat, which also has wings instead of arms. They have muscles [in the wing] to move each ‘finger’, thus making the wing flexible, rather than largely fluid, like a cat’s tail or a bird’s wing. We also have muscles in the arm [or hand, really] for the same purpose. We also have muscles in our arm to move our elbow. Bats can fold their wings because they have muscles in their wings for essentially the same purpose. That’s what the muscles in the wing are for. Following this train of wing-to-arm biological correlation, it logically follows [as I have not specifically looked into bat physiology] that they have the same sort of muscles to move their shoulder, and thus the entire wing. They’d look rather odd flying by flapping the outer half of their wing, wouldn’t they? Are the muscles to move our shoulder (and thus our entire arm) in our arm? No! They are in our chest and back. It logically follows that, considering every other similarity, this similarity is also present.
…
That came out a lot more technical-sounding than it was meant to…

why use pectoral when you can just, work on shrugging your shoulders alot then with the wings ( it would look weird because you would be shruggin your shoulders the entire time) but you wuold be able to control them that way, although it would be alot of working out.

ok im 12 and I really want to fly!! and im looking into different ways you could possibly make wings. ive had tips from my friends and have made diagrams and what not but if I keep trying im sure I can figure out a way!!! im going to try a fabric used in kites, hugee wings!! I hope it works!!!!!!!!!

What about Superman? No wings but incredible flight. Try laser propulsion in the shoes and strong leg muscles or a leg exoskeleton brace. The heat of the laser heats the air under neath you and provides immense lift.

What about the concept of the bumble bee being able to fly. It’s a un solved concept, now apply that with humans but on larger scale. If you want an average man to fly (with wings). Problem 1 is the body mass so increase the Myostatin levels to reduce muscle mass, problem 2 is heavy bones, so decrease bone density, problem 3 (main problem) control the gene to grow wings and then place them in the right place (eg you don’t want to grow wings on your foot, but on your back around your upper torso). Then again science is only limited by your own imagination, when there’s a will there’s away.

Its possible to acheive flight by using motors and pistons that are connected to the brain through the neurological science but the horsepower required to do so would require a REALLY POWERFUL motor which requires a large battery but changing genes is 100 years beyond our current technology

i believe if we connect your nerves with wings ur size u should be able to control them and i can see myself myself with wings i believe that i will have wings some one help me out if any one knows anything please i dream

Having the muscles incorporated into the wings would make moving those wings even harder (it’s harder to accelerate/stop a heavier object than it is to accelerate/stop a lighter one). That’s why all animals have as little on their wings as possible – to minimise effort needed to flap the wings. All flight muscles are located on the back, shoulder or chest of the animal.

It is a very interesting point about whether we could control wings, after growing up without them. I think the brain might be plastic enough to do that, but I’m not sure. Might be a good research project in the future…

i think that it might be possible with stem cell research that in the near future the possibility of taking specific genes from infant birds and implant them into an infant human could become prefected. it would take some time im sure as would any “science experiment” would mind you but bold ideas got us where we are today and so have trial and error tactics. alot of criticism would take place on this subject which is why I’m sure that if we all share the ideal possibilities of humanbirds some mad scientist with a certain familiarrity of geneology has probably been working on it in secret for quite some time..

Interesting point. It may not be possible now, but in a couple decades biology may have progressed far enough to create a “super muscle” of some type, interesting to see if controlling it with our minds would be as simple as we all imagine it to be.

I think that it is possible for a person to learn to use wings, but it would be difficult. It’s hard to use a muscle you’ve never used before. It’s why most people either learn to wiggle their ears when they’re little or never learn at all; I think (but I’m not certain) that it’s the same general concept. It would probably be easier with wings since you’d know the general concept better, but it still wouldn’t be a walk in the park.

I agree whole heartedly with the idea that it is possible for humans to have wings. For as long as i can remember i have been longing to feel the wind in my feathers. It is my life goal to learn to graph wings to my back and take flight, however unlikely and difficult the task proves to be. There is a book series by the author Sharon Shinn call Archangel which give a fairly detailed description of a human wing structure which could very likely work. The most detailed descriptions are in the book titled Jovah’s Angel. The idea that is used in that book is where i intend to start on the long journey to true flight.

I think that putting the genes in an embryo would be an issue (way too much could go wrong with genetic science the way it is now) but maybe implanting them on a baby could gain better results – ignoring all ethical issues, of course. If they grew up learning how to use them like a baby learns to walk, I think that the muscles would build in the same way they would normally for, once again, an arm or a leg. It’s a possibility.

well it would be hard to be given wings without taking over your arms, if you see the structures of birds bats and marine life the dont have hands. They have the structure of hand but the skin is much larger and is very light. If a human would want to fly the would have to give up their arms to do so, but yes having wings would be a great pleasure

I agree on having wings connected to our backs, instead of being attached to our arms. Letting our arms be completely mobile and still having wings. the wings could be connected to our backs with pole like bones surrounded by a thin layer of muscle and a outer covering of feathers.The wings could easily tuck on our backs, letting us hide them under our shirts.

Havent doctors been able to reatche mucsles ( i have no clue really) But if they can why dont they just get wings ( again havent worked out all the kinks to that yet) why dont they just grow the wing muscles with the near shuolderblad muscles ( forget what they are called) and then grow them together, then with alot of physical therapy working out ect. BOOM they would have useful wings.

RAYANEN: they were not saying apes should be apes in the evelution proses they are twisted and suspeding us on ground whats the point in studying wat we can see from hear when we can do it our selfs and grab life with 2 hands!!!!!!
why dont you give people the chioce!!!!!!
we could save the planet from global worming as well if we could fly we would not drive!
scince anyone was 4 everyone wanted wings and dreamed that 1 day we would be living that dream and you could make it happen for sooooooo many people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

CALLEY: i dont understand we can make humans have wings but you people wont because its all to do with god belivers.Face it god ante real we have proof of the big bang they dont have proof of GOD!!

we may have proof of the big bang theory and theory that like the omega theory which sugest the univer expands and contracts nd is reborn but the question is what atarted the big bang and in that question god existance becomes affirmed and undeniable thouhg the form of god is still in question

Don’t be stupid, people confuse ‘theory’ and ‘hypothesis’ all the time. A hypothesis is an idea that makes sense but hasn’t yet been proven. A theory is something that has been substantially verified through repeated testing of a hypothesis/hypotheses. Gravity is also a theory, as well as evolution, cell theory and the theory of relativity!! And it’s true the big bang theory is incorrect, but that was just discovered recently, it’s now the big bounce theory (the universe expands and contracts periodically). These theories have been proven. I suggest you make sure you know what you are talking about before you come on here with your ignorant ideas.

Hey, Calley+Rayanen, God is too real. If The Lord wasn’t real, how did the human species evolve? The Lord is the one who is going to help people gain wings. I make sure to pray one to two hours a day about wings. And guess what? My back always hurts! Really good sign people. Really good sign. And plus, I totally want a shiny silver color for MY wings.

I’ve always dreamt of flight. Like, I wish there was a surgery that connects wingsto yhour back and insta of them being on ur arms have them pop out of your back and connect them to the nerves and other parts as if we were born with them.

yes there is to tell you the trouth i am resserching about it if you want to help me rescechere about it it would help i am gong to get it done when i get a little older but i want too save the world with my stranth and wings

There’s a famous scientist i emailed asking if he could get me wings. He said possibly and he asked me how would he start anyways? I replied that he should study a bird and its wings and see how they work. He told me that was brilliant. hes gonna try it!!! I get to be his test dummy though:(

I have and still wish that I have wings at my back, which I could control like an arm as you say. It would be so cool to be like an angel. Sometimes I already have this feeling, that they are on my back, they’re just invisible or maybe it is a sign. Maybe it means that I will get them one day, but who knows?

If there doesn’t happen anything sooner or later, then I will start the research myself.(Not because I ain’t started ;P)

Zarnlee, I have the same feeling as you. It’s as if I have wings already on my back, perhaps beneath my skin, that are waiting to burst out. I can feel it now- something that feels like wings tucked up on my back. It feels different to usual right now,though, don’t know why.

That’s a nice sentiment, but if we want wings, we have to work for it! There are probably plenty of scientists working in the field of flight though! Have you heard of those bird men with the wingsuits? I think something like that that you could flap with and fly for a really long time would be awesome! What would wings be made of though? I was thinking thin balsa wood because it’s light and probably carbon fibers and feathers or something. But I feel the exact same way as you guys! If everyone does their share of research, we could do this!

I have that same feeling, like i already know how to move them. The only problem is that i dont HAVE them… Anyway, i have been looking into this stuff so i might get some ideas… *Goes to the corner and begins to plot*

@ everyone on this little post- i have the same feeling too! i can move my shoulderblades different ways and i just have the feeling of knowing which positions to move them in! call us crazy but its true. sometimes when im out driving and making turns i imagine im flying and angle my wings, its an incredible feeling of freedom!

i compleatly understand that feeling! it feels as
if they are already there on my back, you can
imagin and almost feel yourself really moving them.
im a small and light person, but i also have really
big shoulder blades that can stick
out far if i want them too. i feel like they
were ment for something but never got that chance.
and call me crazy but when im driving i like
to think of myself flying really fast! (i dont speed
even though it would be nice to go fast!)

I’m no scientist but I would think that it would be a better idea to attach a successful donated Arm-to-Wing Transition to your back near the spinal cord. Which in turns allows you to attach them to the nervious system meaning your able to move them, also allowing you to keep your arms while having the statifaction of haveing wings. So what if you can’t use them. I’m sure it would be a popular thing to do after time goes by and it becomes alot cheaper to aford the surgery, and hell I dont know they might even be able to move them you never know.

It’s not that easy, Michael. You’d need to know which bones to attach to the wings, because if you didn’t attach your wings to your skeleton, the wings would just rip out of your skin and fall off. It may also be a lot of work to get neural control over those wings, at least in an adult, because the motor cortex forms early in development and doesn’t readily change thereafter.

The first breakthrough will be to build a mouse with functional wings on its back.

“renew the infant-like plasticity of the mouse brain, allowing childlike learning to begin again. They did this by injecting embryonic mouse neurons (not to be confused with embryonic stem cells) into young mice, which had been raised with one eye deprived of light. Without the injection, mice that were deprived up until around a month old (the usual critical period for mouse ocular dominance) would have difficulty adapting to seeing through the eye that had been deprived of light. But with an injection of embryonic neurons into the brain, the mice went through sort of a second critical period, when the injected brain cells were about a month old, thereby aiding the mice to learn to see from their deprived eye.

This has profound consequences for enhancement of human intelligence. The obvious therapeutic outcome would be using embryonic human neurons, taken from human embryos or cultured from human embryonic stem cells, and injecting these into adult humans to give a second chance at a critical period of learning, which would be useful for re-learning to walk after an injury or learning to adapt to blindness (or, I don’t know…learning to control your new cyborg limbs?). But on a grander scale, if we could have a constant trickle of neural stem cells, developing into immature…”
Let’s read that again, shall we?
“(Or I don’t know, learning to control your new cyborg limbs?)”

id be happy to test to. i may be a little fat. but im mostly muscle. and i got a lot of stamina. and because of my size they might be able to figure somethin out like how strong you would have to be to fly with wings

I read the Maximum Ride books and I absolutely loved them. Ever since, I have wanted to have wings and be able to control them and fly (I also would like to be able to breath under water, but that’s a different story). If anyone figures out how to do either of those, I’m the first to sign up; I don’t care how much it costs.

I did have a flick through a Maximum Ride book the other day. It’s a little simplistic (aren’t the kids just a few percent bird DNA? Almost the entire bird is built around flying!), but aside from the science it does raise interesting questions.

I have been searched about human wings since a long time ago. My conclusion about this is that if one day mans grow with natual wings, it will look like a bat wings, because bats and we are mamals, and the arm will need to be changed into wings to make it possible. But an alternative avaiable today is an ability to plain after a jump using an special clothes. I had a notice that some people developed a kind of clothes that give an ability to control the fall after jump from an airplane, and it looks like a bat wings. But it is too small, I imagine that if they build the clothes with some wing extension, then it will be possible to plain like hang gliding, extending the time in fly.

DUDE!i thought i waz the only 1 who wanted wings!!!!!!!tha would be WICKED if we could hav wings!we would be like Maximum ride and the flock.only without the weird mad scientists and Erasers(wolf people:))and evil robots chasing us.NOT COOL PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!no evil science people.I WANT WINGSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am soooooo with you Dakota! We’d have a happier life with no flyboys and earasers chasing us! Email me!!! I know some one whos inventing a potion for real wings! mY EMAIL IS dimondsandjewlrygirl@gmail.com

Wings would be great. I wouldn’t care If they didn’t move i mean it would be pretty weird. If you saw a person walking down the street with wings i mean i would be intimidated. I Would be like holy crap. But if ever there is anybody doing research and everything i wouldn’t mind being a guinea pig. Jigsaw_lette@yahoo.com
Bark at the moon!!!!!

Well, the more I read about this subject the more disappointed I get. Come on guys, it’s not realistic to hope that we will be able to add wings by surgery and expect our nerve system, our bone system, our muscles and brain to adapt to it!! That’s nonsense…even if you’re able to find and embed DNA codings to future babies and hope their brains will adapt accordingly (which is a lightyear long shot). It doesn’t make any difference for us! This generation wi;l not have wings!! Come to terms with that.

The only hope we have remains that some new Da Vinci will invent a new robotic pair of wings. Finding a technological solution would be the best solution for us instead of chasing a wild goose of a biological solution!! (although, no matter what is said by these so called geniuses, they are still almost dumbstruck by the bumble bee…so fingers crossed).

Come on man give us a break we all can dream can’t we even if we don’t have technology maybe this could be insperation for people to do the just enough to make wings possible and i’m hopping to be one of those people

Actualy there is a way for our bodies to do it on there own… I’m not sure how it or if it works… But I read somewhere about metamorphic power or something… Its like if most of the human race wishes they can have wings or believes or knows they can in their heads, thedsthen it will happen and we will evolve that way… But the power of thought and alchemy and stuff isn’t believed in much because of science and stuff…
so if someone did a realy good hoax , the whole world believed it was true ( e.g. Someone that had wings) .. So that’s the whole world believing we can have wings then someday we will evolve with wings…

It’s a putty I don’t remember where I read about , the description they had was much better!

Foofighter, I agree that functional wings added by surgery will probably not be possible any time soon. And given the current mass-strength ratio of muscles, biological wings for humans are not likely to give the capacity for sustained flight. And the musculo-skeletal issues are difficult.

But the nervous system is very capable of adapting, so that may not prove to be an issue.

Oh, and we scientists know how bees (including bumble bees) fly. It’s an urban legend that scientists don’t know, originating because a certain French mathematician (André Sainte-Laguë) in 1936 stated that, with the incorrect assumption that bumblebee wings worked like airplane wings, their flight was impossible. With high-speed cameras and computer modelling, these days we know a great deal about how bees fly. Insect flight is amazing, but I don’t think any scientist would be dumbstruck by it.

yes i never really tohught about wings and all the like but i had a bit of a sudden realization the other day and it seems like wings are the only thing missing from my life(i know that sounds like the stupidest thing but hey whatevs) i dont really know any of the science behind it but i didnt really think biological would be possible, but what about robotic wings made of a light weight polymer like carbon-fyber? i know attatching things directly to ur brain stem is dangerious and all but do it kinda like the arms on dr octopus from spiderman (dont poke fun) and maybe have a cpu that could interpret neron signals? like a prostetic limb? i dunno id like to hear the thoughts of those more intelligible in this field before i go spouting out something untrue

guys thats just a movie. It takes highly trained scientists, who are still studing if its even possible to do so. I mean i want wings too, but you have to be young to have this done and adapt to it, so you MIGHT be able to control them. Its very dangerouse to try to train your brain to adapt to the new part of your body. And i would gladly be a guinea pig for this reaserch.

I’m not too familiar with this concept (I want to know more about it), but I’ve always been envious of birds. So, hypothetically, if it were done would it mean that future generations would inherit their wings, instead of having them surgically added? What if one parent was a winged human and one wasnt? Please excuse my lack of knowledge on this subject!

So, hypothetically, if it were done would it mean that future generations would inherit their wings, instead of having them surgically added?

It’s possible, but it may be very difficult. Especially if the wings are to be in addition to arms (no mammals have six limbs), which would require entirely novel genetic information to code for an extra pair of limbs in the right spot, attached to the right muscles.

What if one parent was a winged human and one wasnt?

The children would be winged, unless the parents genetically modified them to ensure they weren’t. We humans are diploid – we have two sets of genetic information, one from our mother and one from our father. Only one needs to have a gene for that gene to work (though having two genes is usually better, as it provides a backup in case of mutations).

Well, I reckon a tail would be easier than wings because all mammals have only four limbs whereas we ALREADY have a tail-bone, so in theory wouldn’t it be better to try for a tail? And then we MAY have a chance to have at least one mutant person before we die, because you can pretty much guarantee that we’ll either be dead or too old by the time we can genetically make wings. I think that they should not be connected through surgery (‘Doc Oc’ is good enough example) but yeah.. wings should be done through DNA instead of surgery, which means it’ll be a few generations time before we can make wings properly. As much as I want bat wings/big red dragon wings I guess we gotta just look forward two seeing our grandkids with mutations. But the biggest problem with this is that unless we can do it on mice before we start on ourselves we’re still going to have to get round the government – legally or illegally because isn’t human experiments not a good thing? (Hulk, The Triangle, every other show featuring that has gone terribly wrong).

Anyway I’d be fairly happy with just a tail- as long as they figure out how it can have fur – maybe cat ears as well with fur on too – but the rest of us not hairy – leg hair’s enough to deal with thanks.

Well, I reckon a tail would be easier than wings because all mammals have only four limbs whereas we ALREADY have a tail-bone, so in theory wouldn’t it be better to try for a tail?

You’re very right. Adult humans have, on average, just four caudal vertebrae (so, four tail-bones, but usually fused into one structure, called the coccyx). But human embryos have a full tail – 10-12 caudal vertebrae. Most of these tail bones disappear during development but sometimes they don’t, resulting in people with a tail around 10-20cm long.

In addition, the number of caudal vertebrae are well determined by certain regulatory genes. Perhaps some time in the future, I’ll blog about how to genetically modify humans to have a long tail, like those of monkeys.

But the biggest problem with this is that unless we can do it on mice before we start on ourselves

Of course. Animal models will be essential to make sure that each modifications works – early attempts at modification may prove hard to edit or remove.

Anyway I’d be fairly happy with just a tail- as long as they figure out how it can have fur – maybe cat ears as well with fur on too – but the rest of us not hairy – leg hair’s enough to deal with thanks.

Fur would be easy, although ensuring it stays in certain spots may be harder (but still possible). A genetic disease known as congenital hypertrichosis can cause people to have fur. This could probably be induced artificially by changes to hormone receptors in the skin of the tail.

Ears…that’s going to be tricky. You probably want them on the top of your head, not on the side? And you’d want them to actually work (hear, move them, etc?). That might have to wait a bit.

So, what fields and college courses should I study to become a scientist of this sort?

I’d say biomechanics would be the best college course to seek out, as this covers aerodynamics of flight, mechanics of limb movements and other related areas (specifically mechanical engineering, anatomy and physiology). An understanding of developmental biology and genetics would be helpful too.

You’re missing the whole point! I have been thinking about this for 15 years. Humans are exogenic–we are able to utilize energy from outside sources. We don’t need to rely on muscle power.

Lately, there has been a lot research done on human controled power enhancement systems.

If you WERE capable of flying (if you were a bird) you would learn to fly as quickly as you learn to ski or skate. You have hearing, vision, touch, and balance that all come together beautifully in the brain and go out in the form of fime motor control of your muscles. Furthermore, evolution has made available almost perfect models for different types of flight.

If this world holds together, sometime in the not-too-far future you will go out to your garage and ponder over which bird model you want to strap on…gull for soaring, grouse for maneuvering the woods, hummingbird for hovering. The fire department will have one capable of landing on a window sill and picking up a person.

And the human power enhancement systen will flow over into applications we can’t even imagine now.

Humans are exogenic–we are able to utilize energy from outside sources.

Humans have to rely on exogenous energy, but so does every organism on the planet. First law of thermodynamics dictates that, with the exception of an organism undergoing a nuclear reaction (fission or fusion), it will rely on energy from external sources.

We don’t need to rely on muscle power.

Lately, there has been a lot research done on human controled power enhancement systems.

Could you elaborate? Is that different to the ‘bionic muscles of super strength’ I mentioned in the blog post?

If you WERE capable of flying (if you were a bird) you would learn to fly as quickly as you learn to ski or skate. You have hearing, vision, touch, and balance that all come together beautifully in the brain and go out in the form of fime motor control of your muscles.

Not necessarily. If somebody was born deaf, and grew up deaf, it can be very difficult for them to learn how to hear even when they receive a cochlear implant.

I do think that if wings were present from the early embryonic stage (i.e. if they developed alongside normal limb development), you would be able to learn to fly just as easily as learning to walk. But if you received wings late in life, my guess is that you’d be like those people who need to learn how to walk again after a terrible accident.

Furthermore, evolution has made available almost perfect models for different types of flight.

There are only three models of powered flight in vertebrates – bats, birds and pterosaurs – and none of them have wings in addition to forelimbs. There is no good model for this form of limb design, let alone this form of flight.

If this world holds together, sometime in the not-too-far future you will go out to your garage and ponder over which bird model you want to strap on…gull for soaring, grouse for maneuvering the woods, hummingbird for hovering. The fire department will have one capable of landing on a window sill and picking up a person.

Possible, but I think that achieving fine coordination with those wings would be difficult if you didn’t stick with one pair of wings at all times. Our nervous system could cope if we changed maybe once a week, but I doubt it could adapt in minutes to an entirely new limb system.

You’d have to outsource the adaptation to a computer, so that all the different wings feel the same and control the same.

i believe that anything in this world is possible, i think for having wings we would need to have artificial muscules to hold up that kind of weight, for a human to fly u would need, artificial muscules to hold him up an strong enough to move already having nero links from the wings attched to the blad bones, linked to ur cerabellum, with that be said u also do need super human strength, an i believe a 2 care lane wings spand (for each wing) for give u enough wing lift to get up off the ground, witht that being said, if there r any scientist out there that have found a way of makin super human strength and operating impanted artificial wings, i am willing to be a test subject for that operation, u can email me at SaamDaRnBsinger@yahoo.com

exept for that humans have been granted the power of a highly advanced brain. The only thing that will prevent us is ourself…

there are several options for man to leap into flight without the means of an aircraft.

Im sure that if we put our minds into it enough…we can create something that will help or enhance the movements of our arms and surpass that movement into the power generated for what it takes to lift off the ground..perhaps by using smart technology that can calculate with no or less latency for correct stabilizing and so on…im talking here of a suit..the greater the wingspan the greater the wingload…and with that less “rpm” or WSPM”..(wingstrokesperminute)…however i agree to having the arms free would benefit the “pilot”…say f.x having a unit that looks like a backpack…and with that the wings can easily get “tuned”…say that the wingspan decreases…and thereby we can increase the WSPM to generate the lift that is recquired…i could go on forever…apparently

hey thanx for the bees flight thing josh,although i kinda knew dat science has a reasonable answer for that,i just sed it for the effect,although there are still a few things to be cleared about the bees flight if m not mistaken,which i duely ges that will be explained in the comin years..
Nehow talking about the HUMANS i was wondering,you know if you are abel to engineer a pai of wings,which u cud attach to u like parachute,behind you like a backpack…provided we can get the lift and a safe landing anytime u want(whatabout that rocketpack?i saw some guy had cleverly engineered it to launch a human and land quiet safely like IRONMAN!!)the wings wud flap it self and we can navigate us through the flight!!!(i do understand that then u wud have to think about the aerodynamics,the wings width and lengnth,and its speed etc. but cumon we do have some clever aero-enineers on earth right??)
just a thought

If you look at the size comparison between humans, and hang gliders,all you need to do is put muscles
(robotic,biological,or otherwise) onto them.
This is also why I think Batlike wings would be the most effective.With a hang gliders’ size,a batlike wing frame,and advanced robotic prosthetics,All this would be possible(Although prosthetic wings would run on the wearers’ energy,so people would run out of breath and(or) stamina,not to mention aches and sores)However, I think it would be worth it.
To be able to fly would relieve stress,increase stamina,burn fat,build muscle(if they were biological)increase self confidence,and they would look cool!
Getting used to having wings(in MY theory)would be quite easy.After flying a few times,you wouldn’t get aches,you would gain the energy needed to fly longer,faster,and higher.
I think that the hardest part wouldn’t be supplying the wings,I think finding people disciplined enough to tolerate new body parts would be more difficult.
All this is based on advanced prosthetics where it is possible to replace lost limbs by reading nerve impulses so the new limb responds to the brain.If someone were to pick up impulses and route it to the wings,you could control them,Strength however is another problem. I don’t know how to fix that problem yet but when I do know I will be sure to comment here for all the future BioEngeneering scientists to read about.
I’m still a teenager,but I have always wanted wings.My desire for them,coupled with an extraordenarily high intellect has led me to believe that everyone else who shares my dream will soon be satisfied.
I hope that I can at least be involved in the creation and(or) production of prosthetic,robotic,biologicly engineered,or otherwise, wings for individual posession.

wen i was young i truly believed that i can fly, it was a thought that i go to sleep with every nite. But as i grew older and learnt about science and all that.things told me that it was just a childish dream. So i keeped it as a deep secret but i told myself i will give up everything 4 it. Even somefing i dearly luv. i’ve always dreamt that i can fly and da feeling of cool breeze at night and watching people walking past from the tallest skyscraper. and im so glad that i’ve found so many information about it and also people who felt da same as me.

in china there is a cat that grew NATURAL WINGS!!!
i think u guys will be interested
#http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2344838.html
also there is no point of having wings just 2 look
good people!!!

Like Joshua,I also read Maximum Ride and That’s the reason I want wings.I may be 12 but I am very determained and when I put my mind to something Nothing will stop me from supporting,working,planning and trying to make it work.Especially when It includes things that I’ve wanted for 3 years.I think we have the technology to do this.We can make it work if we work together and test out our theroies and use huge wings like a hawks all we would need to do is make the wings bigger or find a way to morph them.THIS IS POSSIBLE.WE CAN DO IT.We just have to get determained and spread the word!!!

YES WE CAN DO IT! Mt whole life i have wanted wings and i have contacted as many scientist as i could about it and they all told me they’d try my idea! my idea was to study a bird and study how it grows wings. They told me it was brilliant!

The only way that you would actually be able to give humans genetic wings is to take the male chromosomes from a bird [the hawks and rapters] and fuse them with a female egg of a human woman {first you have to equal out the human egg so it has the matching amount of chromosomes as the avail DNA, avail DNA has more chromosomes then human} if succeeded you should have a part avail child [if no wings] you have to grow them apart and fuse them later (thanks to stem sell research this branch of science has been unlocked!)

That won’t work, Dmitri. The genetic differences between birds and humans is too great for such a hybrid to ever develop into a functioning organism. Such an embryo will be miscarried for sure, if it even develops past the zygote stage.

Not to mention that even if it did work, it would more likely give you a beak, a bird-sized brain and malformed hands than wings.

I’ve read the Maximum Ride books (didn’t like them, am too insanely jealous of the characters) which are about 6 kids who’ve been genetically modified to have avian DNA, ergo, wings. So it’s definitely a popular idea. I wouldn’t mind a bit of bird DNA if it meant I could have wings….. it’s like my biggest obsession…. having wings that is, not avian DNA.

And there’s a plastic surgeon in New England called Joseph Rosen, who claimed that within 5 years he will be able to contruct wings for humans from rib bones. He is also working on a way to construct tails…. He is not a quack, he’s a very well respected surgeon, who is just waiting for clearance from the Medical Ethics people, before he can try his ideas.

That said, I agree with one of the previous comments – I am 100% sure that someone, at some point has tried it. If the technology is available, someone WILL have attempted it. I mean, why have secret scientific facillities if you’re not going to try out illegal experiments?

I really hope I live to see the day when humans can have wings.

As long as I have them too, otherwise I would be too jealous to function…..

I have no idea about this area, I was just thinking about it this week; I’ve just got round to actually giving it some research. I was wondering, could humans have ever had wings in the past? By that I mean those two bits on your back that stick out. Its a shame we don’t know how it was ALL the way back through humans past, Just think what could our world be like today if, one we had wings and two if we had full records of our whole past and evolution.

I have a very good theory for human flight, with wings on the back though. The muscles are like you mentioned, bionic, and the wings made from a very light, yet very strong material that would obviously have to be malleable. Since it is a non-organic material,(a type of metal I presume), it would be able to fold up very small, just like the wings of some birds (their wings fold in so close to the body, you almost don’t even know that they are there)! Also, have any of you heard of this machine that they are working on (testing on monkeys) that hooks up to the brain and allows for the subject to do things without their limbs, using a fake limb that they control with their brain. The wings would be hooked up to the brain using something like this so that it would be as natural as possible! ;P I have done some calculations with this to determine the wingspan, but since I used my weight to for these calculations, it seems a lot more possible (I don’t even weigh 100 pounds yet, I’m not anorexic, I’m just really little and young, but pretty smart for my age). Anyways, another one of my ideas was to get a hang glider and just add a ‘flapping mechanism’ to it so that when you start to lose lift, you just flap your wings!

could humans have ever had wings in the past? By that I mean those two bits on your back that stick out.

No, it’s almost impossible that humans had wings in the past. No fossils of any winged primate, or gliding primate, have been found. Such a gap in the fossil record would be quite unlikely.

And those ‘bits’ are the shouldbone (scapula), specifically the scapular spine and acromion process. It’s even less likely that evolution could extend this body part into wings, rather than using the arms (which are a much easier starting point).

have a very good theory for human flight, with wings on the back though. The muscles are like you mentioned, bionic, and the wings made from a very light, yet very strong material that would obviously have to be malleable. Since it is a non-organic material,(a type of metal I presume), it would be able to fold up very small, just like the wings of some birds (their wings fold in so close to the body, you almost don’t even know that they are there)! Also, have any of you heard of this machine that they are working on (testing on monkeys) that hooks up to the brain and allows for the subject to do things without their limbs, using a fake limb that they control with their brain. The wings would be hooked up to the brain using something like this so that it would be as natural as possible!

I think that sounds like the best sort of plan for humans to achieve flight.

But remember that monkeys have real limbs, so there is a part of the brain that can be tapped into to control a fake limb. We humans do not have wings, so which part of the brain will we record from when we wish to control our wings? That will be a tricky problem.

Well, what if a person was born without legs (the machine is made for people who don’t have limbs), so their brain couldn’t be tapped into beause they have never had legs, so it would still be hard, but since the scientists are working towards this kind of thing then perhaps it wouldn’t be so had to have wings. Also, we can move our shoulders can we not? So, they could hook up the wings to the shopulder blades and then just add a bit more control. But yes, it would be harder, and we would need a lot of practice before we could actually fly.

Well, what if a person was born without legs (the machine is made for people who don’t have limbs), so their brain couldn’t be tapped into beause they have never had legs, so it would still be hard, but since the scientists are working towards this kind of thing then perhaps it wouldn’t be so had to have wings.

Good point. It is true that people born without a limb, or who lose a limb early in life, grow to lose the brain regions responsible for controlling that limb. And scientists are working on this, so perhaps this research could be extended into functional additional limbs.

Also, we can move our shoulders can we not? So, they could hook up the wings to the shopulder blades and then just add a bit more control. But yes, it would be harder, and we would need a lot of practice before we could actually fly.

Hmm, I suppose it could be learned with practice, but wings are so intricate (one has to control them very finely to fly properly). It would be as hard as attaching a prosthetic arm to the shoulder and having the hands and fingers still work on that limb.

well not 2 rain on anyones party but were will u get the wings to attach to ur back? ( u could just grow them i guess)

Growing them still requires some skeletal attachment. You wouldn’t want to have your body supported just by something in your skin, it would have to connect to the bone. And still have muscle attachments. Really, that’s a very tricky question to answer.

The wings could be made of a really strong, yet very light weight metal, so that they would be able to withstand…obstacles. Then of course there would need to be feathers on the wings, they could be fake ones aswell, probably made of some sort of metal with sensors in them to help people fly in certain wind currents. And since they are made of a thin metal, they would have lots of parts to them, so they would be able to fold in very small, very easily. But yes, they would have to be attached to your bones, with [fake] muscles and nerves.

I think that one day, the human body will evolve to allow humans to have the ability to fly like a bird or to swim in the water like a fish. It might bring up the descusion of god but that depends on those who believe in that.

And what if humans don’t need to choose between arms or wings?What if some how they can have both? It would be more complicated…

One day humankind will evolve again. People may not like that but it happened once; it might happen again. The choice to have wings or arms or both should be up to the person.

Wings are not a need but humankind has come to a stage in which they can explore beyond boundaries and guidelines. It is in our nature to explore and move forward and become better, but there must be a line that humankind must not cross. Wings or any other added part to the human body might be a line not to cross; that is up for discussion.

Wow. What can i say? Ive wanted wings ALL my life. Ever since i knew what a bird was. I wanna be able to feel them tuck neatly onto my back, having the feathers touch my skin, and be able to jump off of something and whip them out, feeling the air gather into the feathers and lift me into the air. I want to feel the rush of wind across my face, and see the ground below. I sit for hours watching birds soar around and each time i do i feel disappointed to know that i might never be able to soar with them. I want them so bad that i think i can sometimes feel them their, and want to cry when i stand up to stretch them out and they aren’t there. I hope with all my heart and soul that someday we can come up with a way to graft wings onto a humans. If we cant figure out how to make our bodies able to be lifted up and go into sustained flight, i would still LOVE LOVE LOVE to have wings that i could expand and contract. I cant even begin to explain how much i want that.

i wont wings to just to fly amugst the birds and fly until my hearts content but if human cant have wings then a machine of some sorts would be evented to able human flight and i would be one of the first people to have wings i love them

i study a bit of the bird anatomy and.. ok, for us to be able to have wings and actually take flight, starting with the muscle issue, birds use their pectorals to move their wings, not the back muscles which is why we can’t really have wings in our backs and arm at the same time or our arms would be relatively small. us humans will need to have our pectorals(chest) from where it currently starts to the lowest abs. so good bye abs!, and the scapular wings (the ones closest to the the body) would have to be from our shoulders to proximately our hips.
we would also need a bird like tail which makes part of the air dynamics, another complicated issue.
and i can go on but there are 1000s of other factors that IF one day achieve would look nothing like we expect or like the picture above, instead we’ll look like weird birds with human heads and legs XD. and as bubble bursting as that sounds I’ will still like to see that happen one day. you have my support.

Hmm, yes but the wings don’t have to be real wings that actually grow from our backs. They could be mechanical wings controlled by our brains with their own artificial muscles and such. We wouldn’t look deformed that way. :D

“Hmm, yes but the wings don’t have to be real wings that actually grow from our backs. They could be mechanical wings controlled by our brains with their own artificial muscles and such. We wouldn’t look deformed that way. :D”

speaking with the goal of achieving flight,
mechanical wings will lead you to the same conclusion or very close to it. because its all the same basic design, notice how almost all birds species look relatively the same.
so as airplanes, the study of the bird anatomy let to the outstanding invention of the airplanes.
airplanes are made with the same basic structure as bird which is why all airplanes and most things that fly have the same relative birdlike design.

what bothers me the most is that tail.
all i know is that those of you who want to glide are not going to be able to, not with out a tail.
one of the many reasons why flying bugs never stop moving their wings and glide in mere flight is cus they have no no tail to balance them (this is not counting their size and their wing type, cuz its totally different)
But supposing we have wings just like in the picture of the archangel from x men you would have to be moving those for as long as you stay up and your legs are more likely to fall down.
and if you can run fast enough you might just glide your self into a ambulance cuz you will get hurt on your way down.. :P jk lol.
[that would be quite a show.]

Now here is my hypothesis. supposing we are able to have wings one day(with out a tail), the only thing im quite sure we’ll be able to do is jump a bit less than twice what we can already jump with the boost of the wings.

but anyone interested enough on this developments and concepts as hobby can email me at: 7zeven@live.com i would love to be part of a team or simply share ideas and concepts on such an interesting matter like this one. i will start some concept drawings on my own based on studies i have done and as far as my knowledge goes. and who knows.. maybe we can come up with something.

If the wings were controlled by our brains, we could definately also have a tail, and the tail could have…clamp-like things that could down and hold our legs close to our bodies, (just like the weird sleeping bag things on hang gliding apparatuses), with a simple thought! Of course, for gliding flight, the wings would have to take up most of the user’s back space – they would go all the way down their back, and connect with the tail at the end. One would be able to spread their wings and tail feathers when they were going to go flying, and they would be able to control their wings and tail in different wind conditions. Landing would be hard, but not too hard; do what birds do – aim for something and fly downwards towards it, then fly up at the last minute, and land on it! You would have to think fast, for at that last minute, you would have to release you legs from the clamp thing to land. It would take A LOT of practice! But it would so be worth it!
*Read my other posts to know what I’m talking about with the ‘controlling the wings with our brains’ thing*

I was thinking you could have a webbing to connect your legfs together, like A bat with the thin membrane between the bones, that way you could control the tail easier and you could always have extensions if your legfd weren’t long enough. Though personally I would like this part to be removable, so I could wear jeans and shorts properly.,, :/

Archaeopteryx, an early ancestor of birds, had a cluster of feathers on the distal sides of its legs, almost like small wings coming out of its legs that offered support to the heavy limbs. It also had a tail for steering though. But that would be more doable than a membrane that connects the legs since the protrusions were separate and retractable in a sense (like a cockatoo’s crest).

When the people at the University of Pittsburg School of Medicine have perfected their prothsteic limbs controlled by one’s brain. (Only it would be wings that we would eventually make, not arms or legs). Here is a link to the article, if you want to read about it. (Just copy-paste it)http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080528140245.htm

if you guys would like to get some ideas, check out some of this games like Aion, and God of war II where the characters get wings which i must admit they are very accurate positioned with minor defects.

this is what i started thinking. supposing we have wings in our backs for us to take some lift or even move our wings would be impossible. Would be impossible because WINGS ARE MOVED WITH YOUR PECTORALS NOT YOU BACK MUSCLES meaning your arms must be involved because is the closest thing we are to birds.
So i say we get wings, incorporate some kind of handle and use those handles when we are going to fly using with the power of our arms. i will explain in a picture later.
(so we better start doing some bench presses!)
if you want strong enough arms and pectorals!

You guys keep speaking your minds with out any background or knowledge whatsoever on the matter.
You keep mentioning the tittle of the show and the show, but you mentioning nothing of the backstage,
or simply.. how the show was made possible.

Your only providing what we already know.
-we want wings
-they don’t have to be real
-mechanical wings..
-same shit..
OK, we got that down.
Now, scientifically and realistically how can we make that possible?
Most of you don’t even know how wings work or have any sort of background knowledge on flight or bird anatomy or any kind of flying related information.
We have a great imagination i’ll tell you that.

Ok, rude dude, that hurt, but I’m talking about this being in the future, as in not possible at the moment! And besides, this site is about wanting wings, not really about how we could get them. (Well it is but not in detail, just vague description-thingies). We don’t want to be bird-people; we just want to fly, so they could be bat wings for all I/we care, and bat anatomy is different – are you an expert at that too? And this is all just a theory, so don’t get so worked up about it.

And Im sorry, I did not meant to be rude in any way. I found this to be a very interesting subject matter and great affair, but everyone is stating the same opinion, so i ask my self -are gonna do anything about it?-

I gave some information, so some of you can use as reference and think more realistically towards concepts,(because this article brings concept thoughts to you mind whether you like it or not)
but you ignore the info. We can’t be oblivious of the thought that making either birth like wings or bat wings is as complex as a new from scratch air plane.
If your mere goal is to fly.. rent a glider.

I actually know a way we Can make this possible.We have someone take a human egg and avian DNA from a bird than graft it into the human egg and if we play our cards right we can have kids coming out 98% human and 2% bird and if we do it right those kids will have the ability to fly and for those of us who want wings but are say 30 for example we can probably do surgury and give them wings too and if 2012 isn’t a bunch of crap we can all fly away from blown up and contaminated spots and live.

If artificial(robotic/prostetic) wings could be manufactured(and they could) and a robo-nervous interface could be developed(and already are) then the base of the wings could be fused to the back of the ribcage, and the nervous impulses from the brain could actually go to the spine muscles that allow you to bend, and from there go into the robotic wing, therefore allowing articulation and movement with the wing, allowing for flight….in theory of course… ^i^

OK,- this is what i think, the nervous system issue its not a big problem, as it can already be done.
-the manufacturing of the artificial(robotic/prosthetic) wings, i don’t thing that is the biggest problem yet.
-the biggest problem is the muscle issue.
the nervous system impulses can’t do anything if the muscles can’t take the weigh and the low and high pressure of the wind. we might be able to open and close the wings but not strong enough for lift.
*====[so that’s the biggest issue]====*

Hello jim :) here’s something fir you… Today I heard of something called a morphogenic field… I’m only 12 and I don’t fully understand it.. Go to http://www.sciforums.com search wings in the forum it should come up with a thread that haana first post with someone asking how big wings would have to be to carry a Human being or something… Go to page four, scroll down a bit till you find a post about morohegenic fields… I believe in this persons idea, I also believe that humans will be able to have wings on here back in the future… But I have just thought about something… What if someone uses the idea as a bad thing…for example winged soldiers??? modified troops to super strength… Wars would
Only need two or three soldiers… Good or bad???

I am only 12 and ive been reading alot of the maximum ride books by james patterson and the way they can fly is tht avian dna was injected into them as eggs but what if humans didn’t have to do that. What if we as humans just try some experements like we did with the bionc arm. The nerves in a birds wings are closely related to the nerves we have in our arm and if we were to also make artifficial lungs like a bird just as we did the heart there should be no problem because dont most nerves go through the spinal area just were the wings should go. All i know is that if we as humans ever achieve this goal i want to be one of the first 10 ppl who try it.

This is my dream and when i get a carrer i wnt this to be my job so i can study more on this and make other ppls dreams come true 2

“To attach something as big and heavy as a wing (think about the size they would have to be to have feasible flight) without having the right muscular structure wouldn’t really be possible without further manipulation of overall body composition. We do not have the pectoral capacity to support wings, and since that is how, in birds the wings are brought through motion, and cosidering the power they would have to have, the pectorals would have to be massive. Supercoracoideus muscles also a problem. Overall anatomy is too different in humans to support wings.

Maybe something mechanical would work better, functioning as a sort of stealthy jet pack i guess.”
——
But in fact, wings aren’t that heavy, which actually make is harder to control.

I WANT wings! I’ve always wanted them and I will never give up. I would give all my money (even if it’s not much) to have them! But only “natural” ones. No metal, no engine on my back. The way I would like is bird-style feathers, not even bat or pterosaur wings. But maybe others would like otherwise, they would have a choice. I would also like to keep my arms, I’m not that crazy to give them up for having wings (lol I couldn’t type this comment then).

I’ve been looking around on the net and searching for more data about it, and I’ve found that it may be possible. Based on typical wing loading of gliders (30 kg/m²) an average human like me with 75 kg of weight would need 2,5 m² of wing area. It is possible!
And gliders don’t flap with their wings…

About body modifications: the way they will be done is genetic engineering. It will be tested on computer simulation (may be better in the future as we will know more of the human body and have better computers), rats, guinea pigs, pigs and chimpanzees and then finally volunteers. A weak virus (like rhinovirus) will get the DNA in the body and changes cells. Therefore the modified cells will start to grow that way so wings will grow within a few months (okay, maybe years but it’s still good).
If we make bones hollow, it lightens the body about 5%, but the weight of wings come so it equals to normal weight I think.
As mentioned above, the lungs will have to be more efficient and save space for muscles moving the wings. Wing bones will connect to the spine at around its middle.

Don’t worry about moving them, humans can learn moving machines with the power of their mind if connected to them. Like there was a “game” where pong was played in real but you could only move the paddles by thinking of them (of course with a help of EEG or something like that).
Human brain is very flexible so it will be able to do the task, just we need neural channels in the wings, too. And feedback, it’s very important. Like you don’t break eggs because you feel the pressure with your hand. Feedback can be really important during a flight.

Descendants would get the wing genes also, even if only one parent would be winged (it’s a dominant gene ;)) unless treated by an “anti-virus”. Childs would grow wings and they would be able to fly with them about their age of 8, of course they would not stop growing then. From that age their wings will grow at the same speed as the normal body will.

For those worrying about having those big wings: you could fold them and normally standing they would be a little taller than you with their tips about 10-15 cm above the ground. Calculating with my 187 cm size and if they would be 30 cm taller then me, the total wingspan would be about 600 cm (if we count curves and longer feathers). They would only be a little more wider than you, but if you turn them they will just point behind you being narrow. You could sit or lie on them, they would not hurt, just like your arms or legs. Plus you can use them as a blanket on cold nights or just hug people with them. :)

i think that weak virus is a good idea…Your on to something there…..But what happens, when instead of your decendents getting wings, something happens because you got yours from a virus or somethign…Sorry, im really bad at wording things…

ok we go the dreams, the desires, and all kinds of thoughts, can we now go on with the actual visible concepts plz. i have already shown mine. but to make it better i need other view points.
here it is again:

what materials can we make the wings out of?
some of us want the real bird looking wings.

I would love to have wings, and let it be tested on me. I think that the desperate ones(including me)don’t care about what kind of wings they get, as long as they can fly. So if there is enyone who know some serious people who need someone to test wings. Please notefy me.
Ps: I’m from europe.

If biological wings can not be created the mechanicel wings. this would work by creating a part of robotic wings and then like in spiderman with the science that has robotic tenticles (sound crazy but could work) placing the wing on the back (mostly held on by straps and some kind of harness). Insert small electrodes close to the spine then inject a some kind of chemical or hormone that stimulate nerve growth. the electrode will pick up any electical signals. the brain will send signels to the electrode and slow work out that it can get different movements. This methode would take many years of engirneering and physical pheropy. but that will get a pair of wings that could potentionly fly with.

Obviously, this would be possible with the high science out there today. Scientists always experiment on stem cells, so why couldn’t they graft wings on us? Even though for my young age, it would be incredibly painful and just unbarable. However, with my great and almost obsessed idea of having wings, i think i would actually go through with it. Would it be even possible? to graft wings on us? I would be honored to be experimented on if it meant having usable wings.

I agree; I am completely petrified with needles (not because they are ‘painful’, they aren’t), but even thinking about them makes me feel dizzy, but I would go through with the horrid pain and the needles if it meant having wings!

Zarnlee, I have the same feeling as you. It’s as if I have wings already on my back, perhaps beneath my skin, that are waiting to burst out. I can feel it now- something that feels like wings tucked up on my back. It feels different to usual though, don’t know why.
Have you guys read the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer? I have- was thinking maybe develop electronic wings to fly with, like Holly. They could be part of clothing, or be strapped on, or grafted to our bones (painful, though).
Wouldn’t want to lose my hands, though. Not that that happens in Artemis Fowl.
I have read Maximum Ride.
I WANT WINGS!
I’m twelve years old.
Would my age help me have wings?
Probably not. I want to be a scientist and artist when I grow up. I have seen tv programs on DNA modification. I love science!!!

yes yes YES! thats how i feel too! When I am running down a hill I just want to jump into the air and flip them out! THey feel like they are there just waiting ! I read all of those books,too. I am 15, but I look like im 9 or so…So that means i’m very light…I think that in order to fly u must be light and stuff…but maybe in the future you can be a grown up and fly.

However, if we were able to get the DNA for hollow bones into te human structure, then there would be nothing stopping us. Our weight would be greatly reduced and would thus allow smaller more reasonable wing sizes.

I want to voulunteer for wing-work, if you know anyone who would test me for free, i will go there. I weigh only 120 pounds so I would have smaller wings than others-email me back at brivandale@gmail.com please!

*I would have to have feathered bird wings that were colored dirty-blond so they could match my hair. :P

So…. how heavy flying nimals may be, or better have been? Some Pterosaur species outweighed us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus 100-200 kilograms of flying beast. But that had its cost, 10-12m wingspan, and an optmized anatomy. We have heavy legs, walking, climbing running… you can do that or fly, the anatomy of all flying species with their lame walking abilities shows that.
Arms to wings, or extra wings would need serious power, and particularly large size. despite folding their wings, when on ground, these behemot limbs were quite hampering the good old Pterosaurs. But still, there might be some useful intermediate space. Sport technology right now teaches something.

And a few brave mad people are experimenting with the possibility of landing that cuteless, but safe. Ok, that’s nota bird’s flight, but at least a flyin’ squirrel flight is in the range of possibilities, these days…

How young would you have to be exactly? I mean like a todler? A baby? A teenager? A new born? And how long do you think it will take for us to adapt if we get wings? And how long will it take scientist to figure how to graft wings on humans?

Umm..ive been working on fleshing an idea out for the past few years, ive been fascinated by the flight of..well..dragons ^_^.

but i know that genetic engineering is not that far ahead to incorporate it into changing us just yet, give it 20 years ^_^.

but ..Technology is well ahead in that regards, electronics, bio-electrics, micro-actuators, myomer muscle threads, micromotors, computers that can read a humans muscles and reinterpret that into normal signals.

All of these blended together into a beautiful machine, one built for flight, possibly an entire suit built for it as well.

umm i have the medical term for Winged scapula and i was looking over the web to see about if any1 else could do some things i could do .. but none..yet..

well this is what i can do.. hmm.. cant explain.. but i made a gif to show.. the first picture is my normal.. 2nd pic is with my Winged scapula extended.. im able to do this with a muscle im not sure which one it is.. but i would like to know some theory’s.. i can do it to both of them and repeat as much as i like.. thanks for futher info

ok, first invent a time machine. THEN think about wings. this way you could just go to the future, get the info, then recreate it. and also, the person who suggested putting avian dna into an embryo so got that off of james patterson’s maximum ride boook

I love the maximum ride books!!! :) I envy them sooooooooo much! I want to have wings on my back. Is it possible to control them if you get them on your back. Ari in the max books did after he full grown. But I guess it is a fiction book :(

Ah, yes. You make a valid point, but would it not be easier to graft avian DNA in the embryonic stage? The subject would then naturally grow the wings. Of course, than the morality of this act would be under speculation, and the fact that the child in question may not want such an obvious difference from the rest of our race would defeat the whole purpose. Then we would need to figure out how to seamlessly combine
avian and Homosapien DNA when the human has already developed, as well as how to hollow out the bones to ensure the ability of flight. Not a small task. And not to mention the fact that most birds have air sacks as well. Would we incorporate it so that the gene could be passed on? Would it even be possible at that stage?

Even so, I enjoy your perspective on this fascinating yet highly controversal topic.

yes! we don’t want to do what they did in the Maximum Ride books to the kids, they had nooo choice…So it would be nicer if we could graft the wings on people who volenteer…But it will make it harder..Sorry i can’t spell :P

i think it’d be great to have wings, but i’d think twice about having my genetic code changed. plus, that costs a lot of money. someone said (somewhere in one of the comments) that the solution to this is hidden in mechanics. with all the nano-tech stuff around it could be possible to connect the mech-wings to your nerve system without the danger of messing smtn up. this idea is haunting me, and i might just try to turn the theory into reality one day when i’m a bit older. but until then we can only hope that a suit like the one in the video will be available

I promise you nothing is IMPOSSIBLE I HATE IT WHEN people tell m that. but I swear that sometime before I die I will get this wing iI have been waiting for some may say foolish but I say brilliant. I will GIVE UP ANYTHING IN THE WORLD TO HAVE THIS WING………………..anything.

okay heres the deal,if any of you read maximum ride by james patterson theres some truth in it.you CAN put bird genes into a human embryo.thought the book is fiction,that fact remains true.i honestly dont know what the outcome of that would be in the real world,it could be groundbreakingly amazing of terribly horrifying.based on the scientific statements in the book,gaining wings after you are born would be painful,uncomfortable,and unnatural.you would HAVE the get the genes while you were an embryo so you could gain the hollow bones,air sacs,etc.so i think yes,you can make a humna with wing,,,if its an emmbryo

exatly i need a dotor to help me with that .but you can actily do it to an 11 year old like me . im little smarter in scienntis when i want to i can have a doc. or a ve put it in soend a couple day in the hopital and go home it will be pian ful growing wings but it is possible so if there is any scientis/dotoers/or vets e-mail me at carolinescheall@aol.com iand ill talk to you about it and we will be famouse/rich

ya ur right, but will people stop there? There will b more testing, and forcing the children to do stuff for them. And experiments on them and they wont ever be able to be free! How do we know they aren’t testing on kids now? I really want to have wings, but think about what will really happen if we do it. There will be huge experiments, and they would prob make them into an army to fight ….and everything will be all crazy…I really wish everything was simple, and i could have wings tomorrow, but its not. :|

WTF. The best thing I can say is that Avia-sapiens are more than possible. The atmosphere has 5.24 ppmv (0.000524%)of helium. If we are going to make Avia-Sapiens then we can very easily genetically alter the human lungs and bones. The lung modification will allow us to absorb and transport this trace amount of helium. the bone modifications will make the bones larger and hollow with the ability to store the helium making the body, effectivly, lighter. We could do the same with hydrgen but that is very explosive so I personally choose helium. Also the problem with what wings to choose from, bird, bat, or even dragon, wings would be a personal choice. Stem cells would be taken from the person in question, grown in a lab, and then added to the human frame with a few months physio to get used to using them. in this time the person would have gene therapy to alter their DNA and create the new lungs and bones. Within a year the person would then be able to fly. One more alteration would be to give the human in question the ability to survive in high altitudes and even water. I could go on with my vision but I will stop here to see what everyone thinks.

whoa thats really cool! But would the gov or watever really let normal people in America or where ever be able to fly? I mean, think about it….They wouldn’t like it cuz we could go anywhere…They would prob keep it a secret and use their trained fliers to fight or somethign…thats wat is depressing me!

With fake wings structured on some light-weight fiber with actuators located on each junction, the wings being strong enough to support the human body and following specified measurements for gliding, mounted on a mechanical torso adapter which would be controlled by half a dozen microcontrollers, and a remote control for speed, functions, and whatever necessary, I would definitely not rule out the hypothesis of humans being able to fly.

God made us to be who or whatever we want.
Thats why we have such highly developed brain.
Besides, look around at the world. WE are all different. If god wanted all of us to be one way, he would of. we would all look alike and act the same.
But thats not his plan. And yet I still dont get gods plan.
No one does.
If we want wings, then we want wings.
And we will find a way.
Accept that fact. Thanks.

we can fly and ive developed a theory on how it can be done. if theres anyone here experienced in advanced robotics or bm (brain machines) contact me by email. treyrocwilder@gmail.com.

Man is created in the image of god. most humans cant use 100 percent of their brain. man is only a percentage of god. therefore what is 100 percent of man.

We were meant to fly. we were meant to do anything we want. if not there would have been limitations that prohibit us from intillectual growth. theres a reason why every animal can understand us but only we speak our language.

“Your limitations are only governed by your perception of reality. If you believe anything is possible. Possibilities are endless”

I need to get wings!!! I have always wanted them ever since I can remember. I really think there IS a way to get them. It would pobably be easier to glide not just flap. I will do ANYTHING to get them. Even if I just fly once. I am going to research to see if I can still do it at the age of 12. I would put in all of my money.

my theory is that we need to find out more about bird DNA and the placement of certain genes on that DNA. when we can identify what a gene controls, we can then transfer the desired traits to a persons DNA. this would most likely be easiest witrh embryos, but that would raise some difficult moral issues.

most people, myself included, would probably prefer birdwings, just because they are so beautiful to look at, over batwings or pterosaur wings.this could be difficult. however, if we changed the genetic makeup of the skin on the wings (as Poore mentions) it might be possible.

the muscle mass is a definate problem, but if the muscles were modified…?and the lighter semi-hollow bones would help too. (again, following the structure of bird DNA). getting the nerves muscles and bones to graft onto the rest of the body also represents a problem, but if we have the technology to move an artificial arm,but we do have some very talented surgeons. grafting these on shouldn’t be too hardd.

of course,grafting wings onto a person would be vvery expensive, and the technology would most likely be military only for a long time. thkis raises the question: is it right to persue gwetting wings if they will first be used for violence? there’s also the idea that if everyone can fly, it will lose meaning.(that one really upset me!) however, not everyone would be able to fly. obese ppl, even stocky or very muscly ppl might not be able to get enough lift no matter how large the wings were.

i’m just putting some things out there, but i’d love to talk to someone who has some similar ideas. or different ideas, actually. i’m just 12, but i’m thinking about persuing this as a career, and i’d love to talk to an expert on this (if there are any!)my e-mail is tigerclaw15@gmail.com. we all need to communicate and come to a conclusion.if enough ppl get interested, and get a career in this and really believe in it we can get our wings!

Very interesting theories.
I’ve always wanted to fly, ever since a magnifisant dream.
With non-appendage wings, long enough, a light, relatively strong human could glide.
I am in the process of creating wings of 20 ft in wingspan; I am twelve, welly-muscled, and abnormally slender. I have collected enough feathers to create several ft of wingspan.
This may sound obcurd, but hey, that’s what I’m aiming for, ‘eh?
It’s a secret operation; I only speak of it under pen-name. I shall soar in secret; my best friend is in on this scheme. But one day a human is spotted gliding high in the skies, and word gets out- you’ll know who it was.
-Anonymous-

Hey guys,
Wow lotta you feel basically the same way.
I have these dreams. Not necessarily with wings..
But I was flying. It felt amazing. And as I imagine it in the real world, flying would be the closest thing to heaven to me..
So someone, mentioned something about a scientist in
New England. Joseph Rosen. He claims he can come up with a way to invent wings attached to our ribs.
Has anyone gotten any info on that?
Anyone try contacting the guy?
Guys if you really want this to happen, US having WINGS, ya gotta start making it happen.
Research these things. Find scientists who are experimenting this. Try contacting them.
Its up to us.
Dont think this is impossible.
Nothings impossible.
Impossibles just an excuse not to try.
Well, we have to.
If we want it bad enough, I know I do,
WE have to make it happen!
Ya on the same page???

very true
and yes you are write i have been spending the day reserching but have come up with zip :( but if anyone finds anything knows anyone then please tell us :D cos i know i will be one of the 1st to join and allow my self to be experimented on just so i cud have wings :)

We could actually go quite high without any meens of oxygen suppliant.

Non-appendage wings, as stated by someone in the posts above, would quite work! They would only work for gliding, very basic flight, though. But people can hangglide for hours in the desert by simply catching updrafts!

there already has been sucesfull work using artifical limbs that are better then the original bio limb and there has also been a succesfull attempt at having a rat grow a human ear on its back though right now they are for millitary use only also there has been succesfull prototypes and test done where a person could control a robot just by thinking about it so…. im shure that if some one where to graft wings onto a person and add the extra muscles that would be required i shure they would be able to move the wings and even if they couldnt for what ever reason im shure using the tech that alows for controling a robot by thinking about it could be used to make it work even if the wings had to be artifical im shure eventualy we could have bio wings that would work but even right now the technology exist for artifical ones that look real though they way the laws are here in the states for someone to create artifical or even bio wings the government would most definitly step in and stop it (by taking over the project) if some one where to do the resarch they would most definitly have to do it in some 3rd world country where the laws were more lax the trouble with that is most of those countrys medical facilitys are not a adiqat enough the only way it will be able to be done is in secret and then there would have to be several people as test subjects enough so that there would be no way of putting a lid on it with out the public knowing about it im shure both artifical and bio wings could be done even now with out current tech its just a matter of well that research has been baned in the stats there is 1 scientist that is curently working on bio wings but they closed up her lab she has had to relocate to another country where her progress has been slowed i do not remember where i read that but i do know that the artifical stuff i read about was in the popular science magazins.

no its been awile since i seen that article but if i do find it again i will post where the article can be found on the net. also a friend of mine had at one time found a website where people could pay a billion dollers to have a scientist graft wings on them and there was a realy long instruction manual that a person would have to read to prepar for the sergery he printed it out so i know he found it for shure, but his print out does not containe the website he got it from and i am unable to find it. plus i dont even have anywhere close to that kinda money.

Wouldn’t the wings be their own musle.
I WANT WINGS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For the harness you would want to use carbon fiber or fiberglass and a strap system similar to those used in rock climbing. For the mechanical housing I would recomend either polycarbonate or more carbon fiber. With the wings skeletal structure your best bet would be to use carbon fiber trusses reinforced with titanium or an aluminum alloy. And for the actual flight surface if you wanted feathers or feather structures the closest you would be able to get with todays technology would be a solid variable geometry wing.

I cant be bothered to read up all the comments, but has anyone queried wether we, as humans, would have the actual energy to sustain flight? I mean, it’s hard enough riding a bicycle up a long or steep hill, imagine the work your arms would need to do to even maintain a human body weight at any altitude, then consider the fact you’ll need more energy to move forwards.

I mean, I’m sure we will eventually have light enough materials to create wings light enough for us to glide on, well, like basically a hanglider, but attached to your arms and body, but to actually fly like a bird?

You’d prolly need the strength of Arnie and the endurance of a, i dunno, marathon runner?

i love the idea of humans having wings. it just may be possible for us not to lose our arms in the process. if they needed someone to test out wings, i’d be the first to volunteer(: i’m light and very short(most of my peers tower over me)and i’ve got strong muscles. but one thing people haven’t thought of, is what if we’re still growing? would we need to be adults to have wings? or is it maybe possible for our wings to grow with us as we age? i mean, what sense would it make to give, say, a 14 year old with adult wings. i would think they would be too bulky and heavy. and they would need to be light enough not to completely mess up our backs. just keep that in mind.(:

Yo dude, ever heard of us? Maximum Ride? Ring a bell? If not well we’re not full humans, lets say that we’re 98% human and 2% bird. Yes, I did say bird! We can fly, cook(not me!), and kick MAJOR butt! There’s six of us me(max, i am a girl in case you want to know), Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gazzy(the Gasman, trust me you don’t want to know why!), and Angel. We grew up in a lab where they do the most un-humane things and create creatures using other animals DNA. We escaped from living in dog crates there(litarally!) and still are constantly on the run. If you want to know more about Max’s mutant club(joking about the Max’s mutant club part) You can read the Maximum Ride books. There are other mutants on earth(america) You just have to look hard enough! Of course there are other types of mutants too but we like our bird genes the best! :) Some(few) folks who are 1% bird that can’t fly but still are like us.

Max? Ya uh would you please give me carefully written instrunctions on how to get to the school in california? Because my life sucks and I’m going to California this summer so maybe I could runaway and get wings patched on me like Ella. Thanks! Oh yeah and please be real I would be so totally bummed if you were just pretending. And if your evil scientists are so smart, do they have a caure for diabetes? cause i know someone does and i kinda need that fixed on me too sooo….Ya. Tell Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Angel, Gazzy, Maya, Dr. Martinez, Jeb, Ella, Total, Ratchet, Star, Kate, Starfish, Dylan- although i dont like him that much, i mean stay with fang girl!, and Alika hi for me okay? And Magnolia if you think she counts… :D I really want to meet you guys someday!
Mac

I don’t want wings for flight, i just want to be a winged humanoid, look up haibane renmei and watch the Anime and you’ll get a better idea. I just want small and controllable wings, this anime is truly inspiring and it makes me cry how i cannot have this. any suggestions?

you peaple are fucking idiots! I stumbled on this forum, whilst killing time at work. Honestly- is this a piss take? Do you peaple really want wings and do you really think anyones gone do the major surgry? One last thing- once you get wings- do ever plan on sitting down or laying on flat on your back again??

People are big, but what about extinct megafauna? There was a bird called argentavis magnificens that could fly. It weighed 180lbs! And it was 6 feet tall! Short, light people minus the weight of bones that aren’t hollow and with the addition of air sacs and advanced lungs, the weight of adding wings and abdominal muscles would possibly be around 180 pounds. Also, if the wings were aligned with the spine they could be comfortably tucked in tight along our spines to make sleeping on ones back easier (I never sleep on my back anyways so that is no concern) and I don’t see how sitting would be a problem. Rad just seems like the kind of person who likes to crush dreams and stuff.

Yeah shut up rad hirondelle is a genius i been talking to her for a while and she seriously knows what she is talking about. Your probably just jelous cuz you aint got a clue, argentavis magnificens is probably its scientific name. ;D
Mac.

There are some flaws in even your analysis… It was a great one! However, there are a few things you put out that don’t fit. If my body had eight meter wings and the necessary increase in pectoral muscles, I would weigh just about 75 kilos. I am not short either, I’m about 5’9″! The reason for this is a feline musculature, I have just under 4% of my body mass as fat and extremely lean muscles. Also, you were looking at the wings being entirely organic, although synthetic. Why in the world would you NOT go with, say, aluminum “bones” in the wings and a network of keyed electro-active polymers for the tendons? The EAPs would have the added benefit of adding their own strength to that of the pectoral muscles while still weighing less than our own tendons. Another point to be addressed that you missed is wing shape. The shape determines what the wings are designed for: gliding, soaring, diving, darting, swooping, et cetera.

I feel that these things addressed, the possibility becomes much more likely within the next few years!

Cant abide by all this weebo wings are an emotion crap come to term with your own existance stop living in dream worlds.

I digress, HAL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Assistive_Limb
is a form of exoskeleton which uses motors to mimic the wearers motions and essentiall provide mass quantities of power to your own limbs. Ie the amount of power needed to create sufficient lift. Although the added weight would be an issue however I would imagine its not unfeasible to create one of these systems for flight.

Main interest being if humans could efficiently cover large distances of a battery pack it would cut back on carbon emissions and energy use massively.

Everyday i look up at the birds flying and i feel like they’re mocking me, i so desire the power to fly, i fantisied about having the wings attatched to my back connected to my spine and nevers and stuff like that, just to have the choice leave a place and go be alone, the one place no one would dare try to follow me, up.

I think havin organic, real wings is of course possible, but not now, it’s the change at the genetic level, and wings would grow as long as the child stop grwoing, so the experiments would be a little problem… although, what about some kinda mechanical wings, something like ‘wingpack’ ? the thing could be attached to mans back and extend his arms so he could have large enough wings. Course there won’t be ability to start without getting some speed, this would be the hardest part, rest of flying of most birds is based of gliding and flaping wings from time to time to keep the hight and speed. i think wings would look more like demons/gargoyles/bats.

But what if we can reduce the bone mass by at least 90% and we replaced the pectoral muscles with stronger more enhanced muscles? The science industry should work on enhancing the muscles involved for flight, if we accomplish that we can obioulsy acieve flight without planes or gliders, and if they worked on muscle to brain nerve synapes system they could help the wings be in sync. So we could start experimenting with smaller mammals with the same anatomy, and see if that works. If it works we could finally achieve flight!!

is there not a way to implant some birds dna in a humans fetus? so they would be like 2% avian and the rest human?
i wish that someday in my life time they could do that :)
but to be honest i would like to sore,glide and fly in the skys much more even if i had to have large wings grown out of my back or attached to make that happen.
lettice randell-15

I have been intrigued by what you are saying but bear this quote in mind ‘If humans had wings then they shall lay waste to the sky as they have layed waste to the earth’ basicaly what i am trying to say is not every humans is good some are more evil and more power hungery than other and they would get they way.

jarno i think your idea is awesome if u have a dream follow it and don’t ever let it go i hope ur dream comes true the most close i got to wings was cardboard and fake feathers i was 10 when i tried it but i don’t think i could ever do what your doing it would hurt my head to think of how to plan it all then build it but u are a super smart person

i kno that some time your dream of flying like a bird will come together and happen mane you could give me some advice

Ive been reading over for like 2 years now (since i finished the maximum ride series for the first time) Even if i couldnt fly i would still love the idea to have wings, mabye even if i didnt need muscle but rather a kindve bionic way to power them but i must be able to control them like an arm of a leg and they should look like feathered wings like the flock in maximum ride.
I think that hopefully in my lifetime thye would be able to do this, im 15 now and i would be a great test subject due to my broad shoulders
Also my Girlfriends would love the idead (yes i am a guy) She si also obsessed with the series aswell as quite a few of my friends

I would love to volunteer. I would undergo incredible pain just to have wings. I am 12 years old and I weigh 70 pounds. I would give all of my money and my arms to have wings. I fell that I was made to have wings, I just want to take off and fly. My email is thomas.garrison@me.com

I’ve been going around this idea for a long time and it’s actually quite nice to see that there are quite a few people really committed, some of whom have actually built something or are in the process of building it.
I just wanted to share my opinion that the best approach with today’s technology would be to design an exoskeleton like the ones shown here which would increase our strength enormously with, hopefully, a very low increase in the weight.
It would also be interesting to be able to let go of the wings with our arms, so a “semi-lock” mechanism for gliding seems to me to be the way forward.
Also, a lot of people here are not taking into account that a tail or something like that would be paramount if you want to have control. The answer probably lies with the wingsuit designs, though it would be amazing to be able to have a tail that expands as you open your legs…
anyway, I hope the answer comes quickly cause I want to try it out ASAP! :)
I’ll leave you with a nice little clip

anyone want a guine pig to test their little wing genes on by all means contact me! i’m going to find out how this works but i need some partners in crime. . . . aka people who know science and are the shit wen it comes down to it. i’ll be yur experiment if you be my scientist!!! but i want wings AND arms. . . preferably bird wings not bat. . . .:D

if it where posible for man to have wings i would want to know i wouldnt care if it where illigal resarch or not if it can happen i want to be a part of it, no ifs, no buts.
ill say anything thats needed, and do anything thats needed. as long as it happens to me andd for me then i simply will do anything.
ANYTHING!!!

hey you all i know you all want wings but if we all could get some i would be put to sleep but I WANT WINGS NOW im already kinda like max and the others i can sleep in trees 50 ft. up and i can heal faster than most people and i can pick up 100 lbs. and i have some awsome fighting moves took down a 25 yr old im only 14 last is the most terrorfing thing is that i hav been tested on in a lab i member some one putting a neddle in my back with a thick blue liquid inside that is all im gonna tell u

bloody hell i want wings so bad its not funny if anyone can help me with finding a scientist that would do test and shit like that on me so i could fly please help because i really want to fly and have alot of freedom PLEASE HELP!!!

This has to be the most remedial, uninformed discussion I’ve ever glanced through. Humans don’t have the build for flight, we’re too heavy, we dont have muscles in the right places and we dont have wings and even if we did, the wingspan would need to be almost 4 times our height. And if you DID have all those things, guess what- you STILL couldn’t control your flight without tail feathers.
Do you like to sit down once in a while? Because you’ll be giving that up with a plume of feathers sticking out of your butt.
Fantasy is just that, kids; fantasy.

The article never took flight bladders into account. If filled with hydrogen gas (which can be produced naturally by bacteria that digest lactose in a lactose intolerant individual’s intestines), they could prove very useful considering hydrogen is lighter than helium. Although it is very flammable, if someone with a hydrogen-filled flight bladder DID catch fire (for whatever reason), they wouldn’t explode until the flames reached the flight bladder, and by that time, chances are the person would be dead anyways…

With regards to the ‘Maltese cross’ position, it is true that it would take a great deal of muscle to keep one’s wings unfurled constantly to support one’s weight, but what about albatrosses? The wandering albatross has the longest wingspan of all living birds (the Andean condor is a close second), but since it flies for long periods of time, it has evolved a mechanism to lock its wings into place so that it does not need to use its muscles to support its wings (during gliding flight) so it does not exhaust itself.

Rectrices would also be crucial for directing flight, yet they weren’t mentioned in this article. They are, in other words, tail feathers. Of course having tail feathers wouldn’t prohibit the action of sitting, since there are many different types of tails and different lengths. They help to brake and steer during flight, since they are attached to ligaments on the tail, so the bird would be able to feel the air currents through its feathers and have direct control over its ”rudder”.

Some of the People here are certifiably insane… Anyway, I think that is is possible to give us Homosapiens wings, but not untill someone gets some major financial backing. Of course, I don’t mean to say that we should already be standing in line for wing preorders, as truely accurate genetic modification is still far off in our future. What is more realistic is the possibility of a man made wearable unit controlled by impulses from the brain. We already have most of the tech nessisary for an external unit, ie. we can sense different types of impulses coming from different areas of the brain. In fact, the main one that I can think of is a power source expansive enough to provide more than 3 minutes of flight.

so all of you peeps know that in order to have wings since we all want them well 1 you have to have thin bones. 2 you cant be over 100 pounds. and last of all if any lab guys found out be ready 2 run 4 your life let me tell u its not easy to do u have any idea what it is like to go dumpster diving its hard.

thanks for the email happy new year! so it doesnt matter your waeight but my cuz is still trying shes at (location must be kept secret) and shell be coming back in a few days she said she already has meds for me and you dont have to use them they can fold in when ur not using them.

i wish i could have wings on my back. i have always dreamed of flying with wings.(not on airplanes. airplanes are squishy, uncomfortable, and slow.) then we could get to school or work really quick and save the world from global warming cuz we wouldnt drive cars anymore.

Dear…Everyone,
I am reading the maximum ride series myself… I am only 12 no matter what my maturity or knowledge scales tip at… But we will always remain human, flying or no. And as someone has made a point bat wings would be much easier, I conclude because they may reach bigger expanses of space without taking up way to much room such as the bird wings. And Yes, of course people would have to meet their wing spanses and sizes based on their ages and weight, and body types. This would be extremely hard considering they would have to grow with you as a part of you, and as far as I know sergons and scientists are still bumping heads on that one. And I am deeply sorry but I seriously doubt that a obese person could be lifted in the air by wings. I am still researching the facts myself I may qualify barely weighing in at more than 80 lbs. and almost thirteen, but I would, need to take extensive rehab after this because it would be an entirely new body function for me, and everyone I assume… such as a baby learning to use their new body parts. And see as us, well most of us fully grown humans unless you are still growing like me this would take years to master and even more time to, support ones full body weight. But I hope to see it as a possibility in the near future, if i come up with a solution, I just might share it with you. But I also feel that cures to Diabetes and Cancer needs to be found these are serious problems… But who know I may be on the first surgical team or the first person to have their very own wings, unlit that day.
Mac.

hey all peeps guess what well in so excited cuz the final book of maximum ride is coming out this year. And also the hunger games movie that plays on march 23 so hang in there only 1 more year then the first max ride movie comes out.

i do of corse hey ok this is going to sound crazy but i saw 7 things in the sky i don’t know what they were but 3 of them were kinda big and the other 3 were not that big but there was a really tiny one so i got my binoculars and it looked like they had wings but all i saw was the shadow cuz it was day time so heads up people

Thanks Maya. I’m 12 ( I know like everyone here is 12, but I’m almost thirteen) I have blue eyes, and dark brown hair that is so curley, most of my friends insist that it is an afro, kind of like Nudge… And my real name is Macedonia, but thats long and creepy so I’m referd to as Mac.
Mac.

hey i want to ask all of you to help stop the shut down of wikipedia and Facebook and youtube protest say no to the shut down of these things come on i know that most of you all go on youtube and stuff

ya im on chapter 40 and man is max getting violent or what the girl that did the book is 16 oh ya speaking of the max ride books the last one comes out august 6 2012 i hope fang does come back and his group and the flock get together. I found out what month the maximum ride movie comes out ether in january or march 2013 so excited

oooh yeah but im gonna be so completeley bummed after all the books are out and all the movies are out mr. patterson should write sequals about max when shes an adult and angel when shes like max’s age.

im not really good at makin stories but i always thought it would be cool if in like the last book they go to the school and find a girl that the scientists experimented with that was half dylan and half max… even though i dont like dylan i thought that it made the most sense… but she would be like nudges age.

yes but not every day but i go 4 times a week but on diffrent days like one week i might skip thursday and then the other week i might skip monday but the reason why i do that is to keep me safe cuz i know someone is after me but when i skip im not at home but in the forest by my house shooting my bow and arrows.

the people who took me from my family and locked me in a cell i dont know who cause they had masks on but i could tell they were evil cuz they called me a subject but i know what state i was in colorado in some canyon

well mac yes im back with my family and they don’t know about nothin and the people who took me well i can’t say much cuz i don’t know alot but i know that they put me in a cell with bars on the windows i was in there for bout 5 days then they took me out straped me to a table and shoved a neddle in my back with a blue liqued and how i got out well me and about 8 other kids had to fight our way out
and no nyck we r not messing around their are people out there who would take 8 yr. old kids and test on them cuz that was how old i was but now im 14 and still running from them

Kill your hopes of becoming an experiment? Wow. There are plenty of research studies you can volunteer for online. What “Maya” is feeding you is fairy-tale storybook crap. Wisen up kid. There are more ACTUAL ways of fulfilling your dreams. Don’t let others water your time with nonsense, Mac.Hope your dreams aren’t crushed.

dont worry mac im real wat do u think i would be lying about this but sadly im not cuz this is real the kids on the news on t.v and the posters of missing children in the store i bet half of them are going through what i had to go through right now and maybe 36% are dieing

*Sigh* This blog used to be about real science…. Why don’t you two (Mac and Maya) email each other, instead of wasting space on here. I’m tired of getting notified about your silly little conversation.

Oh. Sorry Hirondelle. But I am trying to find out about real science and Maya is as good a place to start as anyone. As far as I can tell “Why not trust Maya?” If you have any good information please let me know.
Mac.

If there is one thing I know for sure, it’s that no matter how genetically modified you are, you would definitely need a tail as well as wings, to fly. I too have read those Maximum Ride books; I liked the first couple, but his writing style seemed to have deteriorated as the series progressed. It would have been slightly more ‘realistic’ if the kids had tails, especially since they would need to be more than 2% avian anyways. The number of their chromosomal pairs would change as well. I would guess that it would be closer to around 40 pairs (that’s how many the largest flying bird has) than 23 pairs (that’s how many we have).

Our brains would also have to change significantly to incorporate all the new functions we would need to perform in order to fly. Our brains adapt to create neural maps for new body parts. When we have a limb amputated, our neural map of that limb gradually fades away; and if we gain a body part, our neural map expands accordingly. I have been doing a lot of research on this topic, but I don’t believe humans that are past an embryonic state would ever genetically be able to posses wings. Rats with wings would be the first step. (And who wouldn’t want a pet rat with wings?) There is always the option of bio-mechanical wings (they do not exist YET either, but are more plausible).

And Maya? Rerally? How long can you run? And what did your parents think of you disappearing? And how does the school let you only go 4 days a week? And sorry for asking so many questions but i want info! Thanks.
Mac.

no problem mac well now let me c ummm… i can run up to 30 min. and my parents just thought i got took by my real dad. and my school well they just don’t care wat days i miss as long as i do make up work so ya.

Lol. I want to go to your school. And didnt your parents press charges? And do you know exactly how fast, you can run? And do you have any siblings? And do you have any fighting experience?Thanks.
Mac.

well ya they did my dad got arested how fast i can run well i was clocked in at 6.3 min. running a mile so im guessing at 15 mph. is how fast i can run and the siblings part i have 2 the fighting part well ummmm…………. lets just say i’m around the 6th belt in karate and i have never took classes i just learned on my own

Ohhh yay! So did i! You should have seen this kid who bit me today!!! But 6.3… was that the last physical fitness test? i clocked in at 7.2 when i was 10! But didnt your dad say something? I mean he didm’y kidnap you! Thanks Maya!
Mac.

If you had flight bladders filled with hydrogen, you could breath fire by expelling some of the hydrogen through your mouth and ignite it with a little platinum dust on your teeth. And the flight bladders would help you fly as well.

Nope. Teeth are much stronger than you think. They are made up of calcium and they take the longest to decompose after you die, even longer than bone! You would, however, need plates of some hard, organic material covering the inside of your mouth so IT doesn’t get burned. You would probably also need a false palate that could close when ever you breathed fire so that none of the fire could accidentally go back into your lungs and burn them.

Withstanding heat and withstanding blunt force are very different things. Humans also break bones pretty easily. It’s all about the chemical composition. That’s why they use teeth records to identify victims after a fire has burned them to a crisp.

Oh my science! Mac, I seriously question your intelligence. You seem to more readily trust the commentators who are on here merely to make petty conversation, not to discuss true science! I’m sorry to say, but I don’t believe you are really capable of understanding genetics. You say you want to “…know everything about getting wings and the DNA make up of them…” But what are you even going to do with this information? Honestly.

I’m not saying that you can’t start now, it’s just that you are looking in the wrong places. I’m not saying that I know you or what you may be ‘capable of’, as you said. I merely said that you SEEM to more readily trust sources that may not be so trustworthy. I’m simply wondering about your judgement. And I can pick up quite a bit from your conversations. By the time you are able to ‘do something’, all the information you are seeking now may be irrelevant, and so many new theories and scientific advances may exist. This blog is about the science of avian flight and wings, not sports teams and video games.

Currently, having real flesh and bone wings is not possible. I believe it will be in the future, though. The reason that it is not possible at this point in time is because it is not a priority, and it would be unethical to test on humans. Humans don’t have the specific type of keratin needed to form feathers, and we are oh so heavy. It isn’t possible to hollow out our skeletons because we would be too brittle to even walk. There would need to be A LOT of changes done in order to gain lift. Also we don’t necessarily have all the technology we would need to make it happen just yet. But soon, perhaps.
My plan would be to isolate the genes that lead to supernumery body parts, specifically, polymelia, (which is when humans are born with extra arms), modify them, and test them on severe combined immunodeficiency mice (since they have an immunodeficiency, their bodies are unable to reject foreign tissue). And of course, gene-splicing (cutting a gene from one organism and pasting it into the DNA of another, so that a characteristic from one animal can be transferred to another) would be essential to this process. These genes would most likely have to be synthesized in a lab, with many others since there is no ‘one’ gene for flight, there are many that make it possible by ‘working together’. Using molecular cloning, recombinant DNA molecules would be created to bring together genetic material from multiple sources, creating DNA sequences that would otherwise not be found in natural biological organisms.

Thank you. But we use steroids to make babies who are underweight in the womb heavier, correct? Don’t we have something that does practically the opposite in the bones? I hope our science is that advanced. Thank you. Please follow up.
Mac.

I have never heard of giving babies steroids in the womb if they are underweight. Do you mean steroid proteins as part of the endocrine system (which controls growth and weight)?
I’m afraid there isn’t anything we can do to make the bones lighter. technically they are already ‘hollow’ because of their structure, but they are filled with marrow and blood so that they can grow. If our bones were hollow in the same way that birds bones are hollow, they would break easily and wouldn’t be able to support us. If we were able to hollow out our bones successfully, we would only be 10% lighter, which isn’t very much.
Bats, which are mammals like us, can fly and they don’t have hollow bones, just really thin bones, but the extreme narrowness of their bones means that the marrow-filled cavities are proportionally smaller than in other mammals, effectively giving them lighter bones than other mammals; an alternative adaptation for flight. You always need to be on the look-out for alternate ways around our inability to fly! The problem with simply making human bones thin is that it would just technically be the condition, osteoporosis, and everyone would break their legs when they were landing. Bats can deal with having weak bones because they are so small, and spend much of their time flying or hanging, and they have much more landing control since their wings are membranous.
People always want to research birds, their anatomy and flight adaptations because they want feathered wings, but it would make much more sense to research the flight adaptations of bats, and solely research the feathered wings of birds, nothing else since they are so different from us. Genetically, it would be MUCH easier to have bat wings though.

I know that. And I have thought of that.But their are reasons as you have said that bats can fly with wings like theres and we cannot. The only other alternative I can think of is researching the adaptations and habits or teredactils… but this would be extremeley hard considering they are extinct… and there are most definetley chemicls to make bones stronger… i think there is a disease that has treatments to prevent weakening of the bones. If we could use that wouldnt it help with thelack of marrow and blood in bones, so that they could be smaller? Of course that would mean definite growth demorefalities but if we only alter it small portions at a time and if it is after the body is mostley done growing could it still work? Thanks.
Mac.

Strengthening the bones (using chemicals) means making them heavier. Weak bones are light, strong bones are heavy. We couldn’t survive without blood and marrow in our bones anyways. But hollow bones don’t really matter. It’s too difficult, and only reduces your weight by ten percent. If you weighed 180 pounds, you would only lose 18 pounds if you hollowed out your bones. That’s a total of 162 pounds. It’s just not worth it to hollow out our bones. The effort-to-worth-it ratio is way off. We have heavy legs, brains and jaws which weigh us down too, while birds have lightweight, aerodynamic beaks that reduce drag, and small brains. And bats barely have legs! They are small that everything including weight and drag are proportionally reduced, and not to mention that the skin membrane is stretched over their legs too, in order to give them what little support they need, and provide extra lift.

Even though pterosaurs (pterodactyls are merely a species within the pterosaur family) are extinct, we can still discover a lot about them and how they flew just by studying their bones, which were hollow, so studying them wouldn’t be too effective.

Mutations actually can still occur once the body is done growing. Cancer is a disease that alters your DNA in order to make you sick. People grow tumors, which are technically deformities. It’s a shame for you considering how females tend to be smaller and lighter because we have smaller, lighter bones. Guys are also weighed down by their muscle mass, and even though muscles are essential to flight, guys have a lot of them everywhere, when they need them mainly/only on the chest area.

Ok. I understand that hollowing out your bones is totally pointless and wouldnt make sense. But birds are proportioned correct? If we proportion our wings with our body size and weight, because we are larger and can support more weight that the wings bring, could it still work? Thank you.
Mac.

Yes, it would technically work that way, but the wings would be pretty big. It’s getting people to develop multiple air sacs, and getting wings and a tail to grow on people, and in the right places that is the most challenging part. We aren’t genetically similar to birds, so all the genes would have to be synthesized in a lab. There would be a lot of testing. We don’t have the same keratin as birds do, (in order to produce feathers), so we would need to be modified that way as well. And we do not have the muscle mass required for flight. People will look very puffy with all those extra, heavy muscles.

Ok. But i do not fully understnad the whole being puffy issue. The wings of birds scaled with their weight size and muscle mass compared with their bodies, doesnt make them puffy… Why would it make us?
Mac.
(P.S.- And who said anything about tails or are you just comparing them to emphasize?)

This may be off topic, but what if we tried to make light weight machines that we can just attach to our backs to fly. Like make the jet pack safer and easier to use and make it resemble more like paragliding or like those flying squirrel suits. I would love to have wings on my back, but it seems like it would be a lot of work/time/money when we can try to perfect the things we have already. I’m not ready to throw away the idea of wings though. :) Just trying to get into the talk with Mac and Hirondelle, i like this site for science, not “I’m selena gomez,” and ” I’m running from scientists.” haha :)

Huh. lol. Ok tara. You can have your input on the science conversation, and that might work but not many people would willingly face the open air with just a jet pack on their backs, and i think its good idea but many different scenarios might occur and the subject in questioning would undoubtebley get lost in a cloud or something. i think.
Mac.

You’re right, but that’s why i said we should make it safer. Lots of people willingly throw themselves out of airplanes trusting that the parachute works, so i doubt there will be a problem with them wanting to use a safer more advanced thing that helps them fly, like superman or something. I”m thinking like a jet pack to fuel you to go up and through the sky, but wearing like a flying squirrel suit so you can steer yourself through the air. Also, with the wings, I agree with hirondelle about the bat wings, since they are mammals it might be easier to figure out how to that before we get to the bird wings. (Personally I would like bird wings better though :) )

lol. yeah who wouldnt? But yeah its easier so thats what we were talkin bout, and yes people do jump outta parrachuttes but they do not have the doubt of getting lost because thanks to gravity they will most deffinetley go down. But the probllem witht the jat packs is we have a poor sense of direction, and we would be traveling practically every way including down up and horizontally, so yes jumpin outta some plane is relative to your idea but doesnt change the objectives of sense of direction.
Mac.

Mac, sorry I couldn’t get back to you on this topic sooner, school keeps me busy. Anyways, I brought up tails simply because they are so essential for flight, and in bats, they act as a rudder AND make them lighter because the legs are very tiny, weigh almost nothing and are a part of the tail. Bats aren’t even able to walk, they crawl/climb or fly. Birds aren’t mammals so it is different for them. It’s a divergent evolution; animals adapt to suit their needs.

We would be misshapen/puffy because a keel bone and/or a notarium would be necessary. Birds don’t have as many bones as humans because many of them are fused, so that they are stronger, and can hold the ridiculous amounts of muscles needed. The ribcage would have to be expanded to hold the massive heart and lungs (with air sacs) required for sustained flight. The muscles would have to combat the weight even though they add to the total weight, so the pectorals would be big enough to be very noticeable. Birds don’t have ridiculous chests because they have hollow bones (which are significant to THEM since they are so small). They have lightweight, streamlined/aerodynamic beaks, and small, light legs that have a backwards knee so they can bring them close to their body when flying (except for cranes, storks and egrets); they are covered in light feathers whereas we would only have them on our wings and tails. They are also missing some organs since the evolution of a beak led to a unique digestive system. They lack a diaphragm, which makes them lighter as well.

We would have to have longer necks too, so we could fly comfortably, and not always be forced to look down because our necks are sore.

Tara, I agree with you that it would be easier to have jetpacks for sure, and I would love that. I mainly just want to experience try flight, and hang gliding has never been sufficient for me. I want to create human-winged chimeras (hybrids) because of my fascination with genetics. Also, they already have jet-pack powered ‘wingsuits’! There are videos on YouTube. Of course they are still in the experimental phase.

Mac, people can use compasses to figure out where they are if they get disoriented in the sky. What makes you so certain you wouldn’t get lost if you had your own wings? There’s no difference, really, between wings and a jetpack, when it comes to navigation.

No problem. I get it school sucks. But how can you say their is no difference? With wings you would be flying YOURSELF not by using a high tech back pack that could run out of fuel any second. Plus it wouldnt help the pollution factor at all like wings would, and having wings would be like running or walking wherever you go. Good bye obesity!
Mac.

I actually love school… It’s just that studying for, and completing (science) exams and filling out university applications is very time consuming. Being a scientist in the future means a lot of studying and hard work.

I said there was no difference when it came to navigation. And either way, you can run out of energy and be forced to land just as easily as you can run out of fuel; you just have to be monitoring it. But that is irrelevant. You were talking about getting lost, not running out of fuel. You can get lost just as easily if you are walking or if you are biking. Being carried around by limbs, (legs or wings), or carried around by a machine (bikes or jetpacks), makes no difference to whether or not you get lost. In fact, since jetpacks are machines, there may probably be a navigation function on them anyways; making it so that you CAN’T get lost. Wings wouldn’t have that since they are organic. I’m not saying that jetpacks would be better (personally, I would rather wings), I’m just saying that they are more possible, especially since people with jet powered wingsuits already exist! And it’s true, it wouldn’t help with pollution, it would just end up replacing cars for a lot of people. But in combination with a wingsuit, one could just the jets just briefly every hour or so in order to keep in the air. If we had wings, we would be soaring or gliding mostly anyways. Look up the smartbird by a company called “Festo”. It is rather fascinating.

Having wings wouldn’t cure obesity, since fat people are too heavy to attain lift. But I suppose it could keep skinny people from getting fat. An economic issue would be that everyone with wings would need to eat more because you need to have a high metabolic rate in order to fly.

Haha. Yeah sorry i sort of already knew about the last paragraph, but i am a nutorious, exagerator so i was just proving a point. And i beleive you about college applications, it takes me like half an hour to fill out my camp forms… and wich ones are you considering because i would like to be a college graduaBte for science to. But however unfortunateley or fortunatley i never study. Ever. But im still in middle school so it effects me for like zilch in the future.
But, back to the topic, on the ground we have relative landmarks describing the location of certaain points, and that would bring a totally new meaning of no texting while flying, because what would prevent people from running into each other if they werent paying attention, or running into other things. Unless put like ginormous monuments or signs on the ground what would keep us from going from home to the grocery store, or from home to Hawaii? Just sayin.
Mac.

And oh yeah. on the energy thing, if we were landing from fatigue, at least we will be able to glide to the ground or something, usung a jet pack it would be like dropping like a rock from 100s maybe even thousands of feet up, now hows that gonna keep ya from going splat?
Mac.

Argh! My comment was posted too soon! I didn’t even get time to properly type “Hirondelle”.

Anyways… The thing with “college” applications is that I’m guessing you live in the states (since you are calling it “college”). I live in Canada (where we have universities AND colleges, but most people strive to go to university), so any university I go to wouldn’t be somewhere you could go unless you decided to move… Many colleges/universities have science programs, so it’s not a problem if you want to go into science. Studying will be very important later, since colleges/universities, especially prestigious ones, only accept people with very high marks. In order to become an exemplary scientist, you have to get a PhD in a very specific field of science.

Considering the landmarks for flying, it would be very difficult, since there are no “sky roads” or anything like that. There are inconceivable possibilities as to which route one can get to get to a destination in the air. I suppose everyone could fly over roads, but a straight line is much faster, and easier.

I think we have universitys here, but there just the same thing as colleges. And jet packs with wings would be convenient, but hard to make without some aid of the person. And if they had no aid of the person it would have tot run on gas or fuel or oil or something like that. And if it suddentley ran out of whatever that was you might indeed “drop like a rock”
Mac.

Look up a picture of a wingsuit. People use them for base jumping. It would not just be a pair of wings sticking out from a jetpack, it would be a wingsuit with one small jet engine on each leg. They already exist, so you couldn’t say that they don’t work in theory because they work in reality! And what do you mean by “hard to make without some aid of the person”? of course they couldn’t exist if people didn’t make them…. Indeed it would run of fuel, but if you have ever seen a wingsuit, you would know that they make people look like flying squirrels and it’s virtually impossible NOT to glide, so you couldn’t “drop like a rock”.

Ok…. Maybe I do need to look at the wingsuits… But what i meant by “aid of the person” would be like them having to move their arms with every wing beat, or having to push some sort of botton or use a remote control of sort every time they wishto change flight patterns.
And I have been thinking about simpler things, this is probably going to sound stupid… but like a harness with wings, and like this article began with very very very above this message, you would need to move your arms with them. They would but huge. No duh. And it would be a major arm workout, but you would be able to easily take it off at any time, and you would be able to coast on it. I know there are reasons thet it wouldnt work, but i am proffessor of dumb ideas and ignorance so this is kinda my category. Thanks!
Mac.

hey all u peoples last night i saw 2 search helocopters by my house with the loco from the place i was taken from wat sucked is that i was in a tree in plain sight but luckly they did not c me at all oh but now i got to keep a look out i know that they know where i am still not telling u and i also got the 3 manga in the maximum ride its awesome

ok so that sign with the R in the circle well it turns out that it is bad bad news we need to stop the company from growing bigger cuz its everywhere already on store signs, soda, diapers, shoes, clothes, ect. we need to have it stop when i was kidnapped they told me that i have to stop a company from growing to big but i don’t know how to i need some help so drop some hints

Uh Maya? F.Y.I. I have no idea what an R witha circle around it is! And if your talkin bout a typea circle S then that is just a gas station for people who did not get there G.E.D.’s so obviously either your doin a great job by doin nothin’ or lyin your booty off! Cuz I live in the states too!
With that WTF look written all over my face,
Mac.

Maya, if you are “lying low” because you were “kidnapped and experimented on” then why are you on the internet all the time? It’s called tracing… And ® <— that mark means registered trademark, it means that company is a registered company and no one can steal their name, design , logo etc. So… if you want to pretend you are like Max from Maximum Ride go find another website i think there are some where people can pretend they live in a fantasy world. :) nice try though

The Argentavis Magnificens was definitely able to fly even though it weighed 180 pounds or so, but it had to take off running like an albatross or a hang glider. So even if we had wings, we couldn’t just jump into the air and fly, we would have to take a running start. Takeoff capability is the limiting factor for the size of flying birds, and Argentavis almost reached the upper limit. It would be easier to fly if we lived around mountain areas so that the thermal updrafts could help to carry us. Learning from hang gliders would also help us.

I don’t think anyone here is believing your story…. It sounds awfully far-fetched and unoriginal to me. If this were actually happening to someone, I don’t think they would be talking about it online. It’s not that safe, regardless of whether you are using your real name or not. And you mentioned being tested on, and getting stuff injected into you, but I don’t remember hearing you mention HOW you escaped this ‘government laboratory’ you speak of. And don’t you think that someone who was experimented on against their will would be at least a little traumatized, not documenting their lives, as of late, on the internet?

Yes. And pluss MissListless if you look at Maya and I’s past conversations that there is a lot more unbeleivable stuff, and quite a few times she has gone against things that she has said previously. I stopped beleiving her when I began conversing with Hirondelle. Yeah, that big white columb is us. But of course your right.
(P.S. If you are reading this Maya if you are so possitive you were kidnapped as a younger child, please give us more…..details.)
With a yeah right feeling plastered on my face right about now
Mac.

i dont remember a lot just that i was put in a cell 4 i dont know how many days strapped to a table got a neddle shoved in me woke up in the cell later found out that i was stronger and faster than i was before so then me and a group of kids got together a fought our way out once we got out i found out we were in colorado in a valley
thats about all that i remember

btw yes i am traumatized and i will be for the rest of my life and the only reason im telling this cause i need to get this out of me and now i can
trust me y would i be lieing bout this but if you think that i hav crap in my head than u go and think that but there is one thing i got to say is that i would like to see you be taken from ur family put in a cell and fed once a day strapped to a table and have a neddle shoved in u fight ur way out while geting shot at having ur best friend die in ur arms and having to leave her behind forever id like to c u try and live throgh that
u have no idea on gods green earth the nightmares i have and then to know that it really happend to you and ur still fighting to keep u and ur family alive ITS HELL

Why wouldn’t they have given you flunitrazepam or a similar drug to cause anterograde amnesia, to keep you from remembering anything so that you could never reveal their plans…?
And How exactly did they make you stronger and faster? Do you even know the science behind how any of that works? Think about it, why on earth would they want to make kids stronger and faster? If it was to engineer “super soldiers” (very cliche), why wouldn’t they just use (most likely willing) adults who were already signed up with the army? Why would they experiment on kids if they could use adults? If they couldn’t use adults, then you would have had to have been born in the lab, and tested on as a fetus. I don’t think they could make you stronger OR faster. All they could probably do is eliminate all the lactic acid bacteria in your system so that it couldn’t ferment any lactic acid using the enzyme lactate dehydrogenase to produce lactate. Without lactate, your muscles won’t get tired, so you could run for a longer amount of time, and lift moderately heavy things without tiring easily, and your muscles wouldn’t be sore, but you wouldn’t be faster, or stronger. You mentioned that all this happened in the states, but i highly doubt America would have any very sophisticated technology at all. It’s places like China, Japan, India, Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden that have a lot of revolutionary technology.
How exactly did you and a group of kids get together if you are all in different cells or being tested on all the time…?
What a coincidence that your best friend was there too (sarcasm)! That is highly unlikely. If they wanted to test on a random group, or people from all around (it renders better results), then there is no way your friend, your BEST FRIEND could be there! The odds are astronomical! And I doubt you would have any time to make new friends while you were there. Not to mention, if they spent so much time and money genetically engineering you, why would they shoot at you while you were escaping!? I can understand if they used tranquilizer bullets, but then how could your friend have died? It would be a waste of experiments and test subjects if they used real bullets.
If you had really gone through all of these horrors, then why would you wish it on someone else? That doesn’t sound too nice to me. I most certainly could live through that. I am a fan of improving our species, so I probably wouldn’t even try to escape; after all, it is the genetically superior individuals that survive and pass on their genes on a larger scale. Those lesser evolved perish in the grand scheme of things, (if enough people were genetically superior in the same way, eventually the whole species would be like that through semi-natural selection. It’s basic survival of the fittest). I think I could certainly be taken away from my family and tested on without feeling the least bit sad. I am not a very social person, and I do not like humanity. People are cruel and untrustworthy and they destroy everything in their paths. I do not enjoy the company of my family, and I prefer to spend my time researching, and experimenting, alone. Unless I am researching with my best friend, of course.
I often don’t eat for days at a time since I am very small, so I don’t need to eat very much food. I have a very high tolerance for pain. I would probably end up testing new things on myself! I have already lived through the deaths of two of my closest friends. So I know what that is like for sure.

And not to mention, Maya, if you wanted wings so bad, why didn’t you just stay there? You probably would have gotten them eventually if they supposedly had the technology to make you faster and stronger. There would have been more needles in order to get wings. Intense genetic modifications are part of a very difficult and painful process. Getting wings wouldn’t be all sunshine and rainbows, that’s for sure! It would hurt a great deal, especially considering you would have to grow the wings yourself after being injected. And your body would be changing dramatically internally, so you would be in pain everywhere pretty much. Then learning how to use your wings, and strengthening your muscles enough to fly would be another story completely! They would probably also have to cut you open for parts of the modifications that wouldn’t simply be altered genetically.

I agree, it definitely couldn’t happen in the states. America is all about their rights, to the extremes. So the right to freedom would be taken away if all this happened in America, and even “evil scientists” have standards. If you know about the company, then why haven’t you gone to the police? You could take a polygraph test so they know you aren’t lying and you could take a mental health test to make sure you are sane. Also, there would be evidence on you, like track marks from the needles and a simple physical test would show that you were stronger and faster than normal people.

no it was a friend a made while i was in there and our cells were in a line 5 ft. apart and how she died was she got tripped on a wire and cracked her skull im still cry on the day she died i miss her so much : ‘{ and y they tested on kids idk but im guessing so that way they could train us or something u r crazy i cant go without eating for days when i get hungry every 30 to 60 minutes and the pain part well i’ve gotten better over the years yay well if you can make my dream come true ( to have wings that r brown and white) then please do

ps. im very sorry about ur friends that died im shure they were awsome to hang with

You are making this “company” sound very stupid, since a bunch of test subjects were able to escape, they didn’t mess with your memories, they made the cells only 5 feet apart (that’s just asking for a rebellion)….and the list goes on. But how exactly DID you and a group of kids get together if you are all in different cells or being tested on all the time…? How did you supposedly all get out of your cells at the same time, and how did they not hear you conspiring to escape (5 feet apart is not that close, you would have had to have been shouting, or at least speaking loudly)? Why wouldn’t there be security cameras monitoring your every move?
I don’t think I can make your dream come true, I’m more of a chemist than a biologist. And I don’t know a great deal about all the genetics. Hirondelle is probably your best bet. It would be pretty painful either way, that’s for sure.

Lol. Maya? You have no idea what kinda crap you talkin bout. I been raped. Twice. I give MYSELF shots 8 times a day! And being fed once a day is nothing compared to an abusive aunt that not only doesnt provide you with nutrition, but also makes me sleep outside while my brother sits on his fat ass and gets pampered like a poodle cuz my aunt doesnt like me. I had to sleep outside!
Nice try though. Next time actually think about what you type before clicking “post comment” and please. please. please be realistic next time before spittin out that poo.
Mac

Even though i DO live in the crap loda of a country also know as the US, i think we are retards. Their pretty much all tied up in the up coming election and black rights as someone said above. Trust me I know. But China and japan is more of techi. And have you SEEN our echonomical footprint? You can add up everything else on the grid including the population, and our footprint is like double! so as someone else also said, yeah we do pretty much destroy everything in our paths. or in americas case everything on our whole high way! Plus were in like trillion dollars of debt! we had to shut down NASA for crying out loud! Plus. Plus now its all up to the soviets! Ok. Moving on. Sorry my country sucks. had to get the steam out somehow. Lol. But Maya. You need to look at the tiny glitches in your story. Like how did they get the funding for this so called program? I think the action would be frowned upon if they just called mr busch and beall like hey can we have line a billion dollars? ya know just like ad it to the dept bill or whatever so we can experiment on kids then let them escape into the free world to tell everybody wha happend? I mean wtf! :I
Mac.

i have and they did not believe me i even showed them the two marks where my shoulder blades are i seen them and they go about a foot down my back and the only way im getting wings is just having them sewn on and a few other things well i know that when i went for a blood test they did found a small amount of avian genes in me so ya and their are people out there that do things that the president don’t even know about

How on earth could you have track marks going a foot down your back!? Track marks are the holes (and sometimes bruises) left by needles, they wouldn’t be a foot long. There is no way you could get wings just by having them sewn onto your back. They would be a sudden added weight, and would cause back problem that wings you grew and slowly got used to with time would not. They would be painful too, and the pain, although less intense, would last much, much longer since the heavy wings would constantly be pulling at your skin. You wouldn’t be able to move them, so you definitely wouldn’t be able to fly. Also, there is no way to make wings that would last (not degrade) unless you grew them yourself.
A “small amount of avian genes” would not do anything to sufficiently mutate you. Blood tests focus on changes in certain chemicals and minerals (sodium, potassium, urea…), diseases, or drugs found in your blood, so unless you were specifically looking for a change in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), you wouldn’t find one. And they wouldn’t be able to tell what these “new genes” were anyways. Foreign genes would probably be suspected as mutated by cancer.
Yes, I know there are sketchy people out there, but in order to do something so big and expensive like this, it would require government funding. All in all, this just sounds like some science fiction rip-off to me.
“Thank god for spell check”!? You never seem to use it… And I guess there isn’t a ‘grammar check’.

I had this dream once where I had wings and I was flyin round I was alone but when sum1 did come I would fold my wings behind my back and I swear I could literally feel them against my back. I am really longing for that feeling once more but this time not when im dreaming. I really really really really really really really want to fly. I have this feeling i will get to soon. But not when I’m asleep.

Oh yeah. And it looks like im the only one on here with actual modified DNA! i mean seriously dont joke around about that crap! Not funny. Painful. And lasts 4-EH-VER! And, bonus points for me, mine isnt some dumb made up story. I take insulin and it has DNA origins, wich means grown in a lab. But on the down side it messed with my DNA in the bad way. Sigh.
But anyways.
Mac.

Insulin is produced using plasmids, so yes, it is mass produced in a lab, but it doesn’t alter your DNA, it merely keeps your blood sugar at the appropriate level. You would obviously have track marks if you had to inject yourself with insulin.

:D Yeah I know. But on some website I read that diabetics have alterations in there blood cuz of the insulin,(therefore thats why we cant give blood), so it messes with your DNA sorta, but not mch at all, certainly not enough to notice anything different.
Mac.

no, it is the truth. I would still be doing this project regardless of how many people joined, but it would take me significantly longer to do so. And, input from other people could help me out, tracking progress, etc.

Maya, you are unbelievable! Making up this story about how you were captured for attention, then now you are clamping on to this new project idea. Why do you think we are all gullible enough to believe your story? You talk about how bad these labs are that test on people, then you go crawling back to science the first chance you get for ANY opportunity. I’m not insulting this program, it’s just ridiculous how this “Maya” is acting! I can’t believe you are 15, you act like a child.

Maya, you are welcome on our site. There will be limitations to your involvement though, being 15.
I try not to judge people though, we’ll see. I personally find this story to be difficult to believe. I can’t say it is impossible though.
Who knows what other secret bases have experiments going on. We could be like 10 or so years more advanced than we think right now.

yes finally some one gets it and kinda believes me and well as for watt u said misslistless well i like science a lot and i also like to try new things and like i said there are people out there who do things that the president don’t even know about

Luchi said s/he found your story difficult to believe. And we ARE more advanced than we think, we just haven’t put it all together yet. Again, your story has so many holes in it. Of course your story isn’t impossible, we have slave labor over in China, along the Ivory coast, etc, and people are being abused and mutated (not in good ways, and not in clean, pristine, white, sterile labs), but it’s not in America, they outsource everything, even people, to cheaper countries (with laws that aren’t as strict). It’s just the way you are telling your story; you contradict yourself SO much.

Yup once again shes right. But its probably China that most of this going on. Their over populated. And im sure no body would notice if a few hundred kids from the orphanages just disappeared. I actually watched a video that they are bringing back the death room. Ugh.
Mac.

that is a lil creepy about the death room mac im so happy i just got over the flu now i can go to my school dance today and wear my new hunger games t-shirt oh ya if any of u have never read the hunger games its awesome (if ur into 12-18 yr. old kids killing the heck out of everyone)

The Hunger Games is a great example of how communism would work! :) They truly are great books, the author has a wonderful writing style, even though they seem like a rip-off of Battle Royale… Oh well, I prefer the Hunger Games trilogy anyways.

Disclaimer: I have NOT read any of the aforementioned books, these are just my own thoughts. sorry if Im just repeating someone else’s.

Biological wings would probably be impossible to create. Mostly because of our metabolism, cardiovascular system and respiratory system. The nervous system could adapt and even our muscles could be grown in a proper way. But the cardiovascular system, I believe to be the primary problem with biological wings.

Metabolism:
It takes a huge amount of energy to move muscles in such a way as to grant flight. Even birds, which are BUILT for flight prefer to “walk” if given the option. Now, that energy has to come from somewhere, and in the case of humans, it is breathing and food. Breathing will be covered lower. Food is a problem. At least for long flights. Short bursts (say 10-30 minutes max) would be possible, as we can eat and store enough energy, but flying would be the equivalent of running 5 marathons at once.

Respiratory system:
As mentioned, our (mammal) lungs are far less efficient than bird lungs are. Not as much of a problem, if we can increase the gas exchange ratios in our lungs, or (a long shot) train our current lungs.

Cardiovascular system:
Here is the problem. An additional limb would require a VAST amount of blood. Considering that in some cases our current hearts can’t handle it already, adding a new pair of limbs would devastate our hearts. We would need either bigger, or faster beats, to pump through the additional blood needed. Now, a bigger heart would be a problem, since that (today) is a clear indication of imminent heart failure, as well as the need of the arteries to thicken, to prevent rupture. Quicker heartbeats could work, but it would make us tired faster, more prone to disease, and an area of study suggests that it would also shorten our lives (That our lifetime is limited/tied to the amount of heartbeats we have). But, either a quicker heart, or another (secondary) heart would be the only options that I can see.

Nervous system:
We are actually damned adaptable. People without hearing will adapt to sound when they get the implant. It will not be instant, but they will adapt. Same for people after strokes, they will adapt to the feeling of certain limbs, certain motions. It would not be overnight. You would not be implanted wings, wait 2 weeks for the healing and then gracefully fly off into the sunset. NO! It will be months before one could achieve even liftoff, years before actual sustained flight. But that’s just it. After years of hardships, one could fly. The limit would be the new bones/muscles/blood and one’s own determination.

All that said however, here are my thoughts on where and how we could do it, if the previous problems are solved.
We could attach the bones for the wings, to the bottom of our shoulder blades. Why there? Because its the 2nd best location, and the first one (our floating ribs) couldn’t support us. Attaching to the shoulder blades would be best, as at the bottom, there is only 1 muscle attached to it (and we could do it without harming the muscle), the shoulder blades themselves are capable of supporting our body, we have the nervous system nearby, and if we splice our liver artery, we can provide the blood. Muscles would also benefit as we have some current exposed (unused) points, such as the top of the shoulder blades, the spinal vertebrae, and if we cut and modify existing muscles slightly, the ribs. We would lose some torso mobility. And we would have to deal with the heat loss through leathery wings, the autoimmune system would require some thought (mostly just the lymphatic system) and the sheer size of the wings themselves would be an issue, and that’s just from the top of my head.

As for DNA manipulation, it would be hard to achieve in this decade (at the very least). We cannot simply replicate bird DNA and grow it into us, as it would create a whole host of problems, ranging from cancerous cells (most likely), to autoimmune diseases, to improper growth (place, dimensions, support systems). To give you an idea, they ARE developing genetic cures (and these target only 1 single gene, yet affect a couple of dozen), and you have a small chance of actually not having any side effects. Affecting our genetic code well enough, to grow wings, well, it would be like building the Eiffel tower in the iron age. Its possible, but HIGHLY unlikely.

hello everybody, id love to introduce myself by my name but the feeling of fear of prosecution from this “free” country leaves me as joeflo.

i have read some of the comments and skimmed through all and while some may be for and others against or just throwing their 2¢ in i know that most peoples view in my terms is “shut the **** up and do it”. knowing that so many people would like to group together and merge their thoughts and information on the same project has brought me back on track.

this would be a better time than any to reveal my age; i am sixteen. as to “getting back on track” i have been working on this flight project for the last 4 and a something years and i gotta say it is coming along good.my work includes sketches, models, and i will be working on a prototype this coming summer (finally).my design is very common-sensed (and light weight yet strong tough and durable). the wings are not ‘biological attached’ to the body but is really just a machine made to conform and attach itself to the human body organically and by these attachments ‘adapt’,per say, (ive never actually said per say) the body for flight.

ive stayed on this project non-stop for 3 out of the 4 something years but recently for the past 6-8 months ive been in a real crappy depressive state because it seemed everytime i looked to see about others i hoped were out there working on the project all i saw was ‘No’,’Never’, ‘dumbass’, ‘you cant’, and my favorite ‘impossible’. it was all the negativity that brought me down, but thanks to you all im gonna change this world, and not just by making this ‘crazy idea’ a reality why stop there? im talking BIG,im talkin GIMUNGALOIDIOUS we the people, the real people, the true righteous original people who want to free this world are gonna do it. i aint kidding we are gonna end hunger, gonna end poverty, gonna end abuse,we are going to make this world free, but not the webster dictionary definition oh no, im talkin about the free that YOU feel that YOU want. why do we choose to make that a difficult task, live and let live.

forgive me for drifting off topic but that was bottled in me for a while. my main point on this topic is i am in the process of making it the way described. i thank and love you all,God bless and keep doin yo thang.

i agree with you joeflo i want to end all of the hunger, abuse, and cruelness the world has I WANT THE WARS TO STOP WHY CANT PEOPLE JUST GET ALONG WE R JUST HURTING OUR SELFS……… the whole world has gone to hell

hi there i m 30 years old from poland and i dont think i know that is possible to fly with wings attached to your back. what i m talking about is mostly soaring and have foot launch on high wind. to create that wings we dont need super light materials but close to it. we have that materials allready . you can fold them and do good stunts. and for little flapping in the flight you dont need supernatural strenght. the cost of making them would be approx 20 thousand pounds. szadycbr@yahoo.co.uk my email. if there is a person who have the money and acces to formula 1 tehnology. somewhone with good computer design skills. actually i think about real scientist serius person. i can show u how to do it ,how to design and we can build it. i will do tests . we can make patent ,put it on the market and get rich. my name must be on the project. i want 10 percent from sales. after a while we can make it cheaper and avaliable for everyone. i just want to have life thats why i need to get paid. only serious offers please. and how you gonna argue with goverment about any issue thats your problem but be sure somewhere there will be issues.

I’d think if someone was seriously thinking of doing this instead of making it purely biological. why not make it purely robotic. make the wings out of a totally different material and then somehow attach it to your rib cage or something. for one thing it would be alot easier to do and it would elimnate the need to grow better muscles. though as humans we dont use the full potencial of our muscles anyway :P

Thank you, I have recently been searching for information approximately this subject for ages and yours is the greatest I’ve found out till now. But, what concerning the bottom line? Are you certain concerning the supply?|What i do not realize is if truth be told how you’re not really a lot more neatly-favored than you might be right now. You’re very intelligent.

The part where it says “you wouldn’t be able to glide unless you could hold this position” wouldn’t be true if you had wings, because if we did have wings then it would increase our upper body mass and weight therefore letting our upper body sloping farther to the ground when falling, so we wouldn’t have to hold this position….and that is inaccurate information, that stunt is holding your body completely parallel where when falling the only muscles you would need to keep your body straight would be your abdomen muscles.

I WILL DO ANYTHING FOR A PAIR OF LIGHT BLUE WINGS. IDC IF I NEED TO GIVE YOU MY I POD AND MY PHONE AND ALL MY VIDEO GAMES ( I’ll miss you world of Warcraft ) BUT PLEASE IM BEGGING YOU!!! WINGS ARE THE ONLY WISH I WOULD EVER HAVE. ILL EVEN BUY YOU A FLAT SCREEN!!!!! PLEEEEAAAAASSSSEEE!!!!!!!!

Supposedly humans use to have gills, and spme still have webbed feet, a product of adaptation i suppose but to perpously transform human lungs into fish gills or to just add them in their? Because we might just be able to filter the oxygen out of the water and breath that, but then of course their is only like.0002 percent water in every ounce of water so good luck with that.

would it be possible to transplant the wing muscle tissue on to a human and try to geneticly infuse wings to our natural build? i am a young girl so i apologize for any wrongs terms or strangly stupid idea’s

Having wings would be like having feathery arms on your back. Micro raptors and archaeopteryxes had wings with hands at the bends of their wings, so they could fly/glide and pick things up. And you would need to gave a tail in order to fly anyways. Both having extra arms and a tail are real occurrences. Polydactyly is when people have multiple arms and tails are part of human vestigiality, but neither function properly or look very good.

i have wings
they hurt to get, me and my friend both are growing wings and it happens at night. It feels like your back is being ripped open and then, you can feel your muscles getting stronger and now we both have nubs on our backs and extra muscles and that was only in one night!

I concur wholeheartedly. I wish people would stop making up elaborate stories just to get attention. It’s just irritating. They act so confident, yet they never post pictures. The rule of the internet; pics or it didn’t happen.

I doubt photoshop would be a problem, since lying is childish and psychopathic. The most exciting thing kids can do to their pictures is add sparkles… I don’t believe they could successfully photoshop wings onto a person and make it look realistic.

i want to have wings i believe that if i cut my arms off and resew my pet ducks wings on to my arms tha i will be able to fly once they frecover after the stitching heals and then i can take to the skies and become 1 with the leaf

@inwe well obviously id use my feet duh wow you do realize were descended from monkeys and the greater apes wow i can use my toes to handle a saw what are you stupid and obviosuly i know id need some help to sew my ducks weings back on but thats what friends are for right im gonna have my friendd do it for me hes a scientist its legit ok jeez

i dont mean 2 b rude back or any thing but hey did u read my post at all my friends a scientist so i no what im doing ok hes got access to medical supplies and stuff so i can get all the morphine i need and painfkillers so it doesn t hurt and duh obviously id be cutting through muscke what do u think ur arms r made of man same wit the ducks wings obvious i cant just magically poof them off i want 2 fly more than u understand and i no exactly how im gonna make it happen were just wating to get more bluprints drawn up and stuff so we make sure nothing goes wrong or anything itll be fine tho im sure ive been planning this for three months now

You obviously don’t know what you are doing. Duck wings would be way too small to ever allow you to gain even the slightest amount of lift (not even condor wings could hold you up), and you have nothing to keep your legs up, unless you plan on cutting those off too… Also, you would never be able to control these duck wings; birds and humans are just too different, the nerve endings would never match up. They would eventually rot off of your body and give you plenty of diseases along the way. The whole process would be very painful even if you were given pain killers. It would be painful afterwards and every time you attempt to move your tiny duck wings. No one in their right mind would ‘help’ out a stupid kid like you. If you have been working on this for months, then you have been getting your information from all the wrong places.

no its ok inwe no big dealio & thnx it mens a lot 2 me i just kno things r gonna work out fantasticly jake my cuz knoes just what 2 do so yea im not worried

wow ok misslistless u kno what u dont kno what ur talking about at all becuz i kno excatly what im gonna do and my plan is perfect ive gone over all the possiblitys and i kno how to work them ive been watching my duck like a hawk hahaha sea the pun there birds like my wings but yea anyways ive seen how crackers (my duck) does it an i think all im gonna need 2 do is just practice a lot i made some practice wings with the wrie from a coat hanger and duck tape and feathers i bought from the craft stroe by my house so yea its gonna be fine im pretty good at it so far i think for not having actual wings yet but we kno how 2 do it we jsut have 2 go over stuff a little more an plan before we actually do the surgery plus ive got 2 start on a special diet an take anibyotics for a couple months befor we can be sure i dont get sick from the duck dna

at least its for sceiecn and a good cause so yea!!

and im not a stupid kid either wow what are u 12 u sound like a real jealous jerk if u ask me maybe ur just upset u dont have any connections who can get some wing plan set up for u 2 but hey thats what u get for bein a jerk man

Yes, indeed, I do in fact know what I am talking about. You can’t deny the laws of physics! You are too heavy to fly, especially with duck wings! You don’t have light bones, extra lungs, air sacs, extra muscle, or a heart efficient enough to power your flight.

“Sick from the duck DNA”!? You *really* don’t know what you are talking about! Humans don’t have the same number of chromosomes that ducks have! You can’t mix genes once the subjects are already past the embryonic stage. Different animals have their genes on different chromosomes. For a very simple example, an eye color gene is found on one chromosome in a human and on another in a duck. During meiosis, the set from one parent lines up across from the same chromosome as the other. If the genes on chromosome 1 from the human are different from the genes on chromosome 1 of the duck, that would be a problem. Also, they have different numbers of chromosomes so the pairs would not be even. You could take a single gene and genetically engineer it into one or the other, but most traits are controlled by more than one gene, so this wouldn’t work either. What probably would happen if you tried your experiment at the only stage you can actually work with the genes, is that the embryo would fail to develop and you wouldn’t get any offspring. And trying it without DNA wouldn’t work either; if you tried to do it manually, the nerves just won’t line up since there is a different number of them too! You never mentioned any proof against anything I said. Frankly, I don’t believe you. You’re just another one of those kids who comes on here to get attention. I mentioned you would get diseases only if the wings rotted off; so since you talk about taking antibiotics, are you expecting your plan to fail?

It’s not just my opinion, but fact that you aren’t too smart because of how ridiculous this is! All your information is wrong! And it’s inhumane animal cruelty to mutilate your duck!

Why would you assume that I am 12? At least I know how to spell and can use proper grammar and punctuation. “Jealous jerk”? Don’t make me laugh! I am an honors university student majoring in science; I have access to all the labs, and all the equipment I want, but I know it wouldn’t work because I have been studying flight, aviation, and genetics for years.

I don’t mean to burst your bubble or anything but from what I can tell judging by what other people in this thread have said previous to you, as far as Maximum Ride goes the details are pretty much just that avian dna is injected into the embryo of a human. And, well. To be honest, the likelihood that you’d even get a successful living organism out of that same process in real life is pretty slim. The likelihood that you’d end up with a perfectly healthy normal human being minus the ability to fly and the growth of wings is probably just about impossible. You can pull the anything is possible card I suppose but hey.

Also, I think some of you might need to remember that in fictional stories anything really can happen, because it’s fiction! Authors can bend the rules of physics if need be, and just because something scientific like the combination of two totally different species dna in one organism happens in a book does not mean it’s likely to ever work out in real life. And if something like combining two species’ dna, once again, were to ever actually work out, it would likely require a lot more behind the scenes work than just injecting some cells into another set of cells. Work that would likely include isolating different genes and bits and pieces of each specie’s genetic code to take apart which sets of nucleotides eventually lead to the expression of what desired trait or structure in the finalized organism.

Work like that would probably take a lot more than just a few years before you’d ever finally see the hopeful fruits of your labor.

if done carefully, and correctly, I believe that having wings that you can move at will is infact very possible…however, to achieve flight with them is another matter entirely…im not saying it will be impossible, only that we have yet to find a way to have wings at all…in all honesty, I believe it will happen in steps…implanted, unviable wings, then implanted, viable wings (limited motion) and then implanted, viable wings which you can move more freely…achieving flight is certainly quite some time away, but I feel that if the it were allowed to be researched medically, it would all be very possible in the future…

I myself, while somewhat envious of birds, am afraid if heights, and am quite fine with remaining on the ground with flightless wings xP

Im wondering about wings myself I heard that liquid mercury when flowing in a gyroscopic manner mixed with a form of electricity creates a sort odd anti gravity thing I say build a pair of hollow wing s that can be eclectically charged filled with enough liquid mercury and the correct movement or flap pattern and human self propelled flight can be achieved I mean theoretically

Human have existed thousands of years without wings, perfectly able to perform a task through LABOR. And yes, with the advances in science, who knows, perhaps wings will be some day a thing of the future. But to have them in your lifetime, or even in this century with the means of bionics? My guess is no.
There will be some that disaggree with me, I know. But think about it: Birds are mainly built lightly, their bones a lot less denser than ours. Their lungs have a greater air capacity compared to their size than if we mammals were their size, or vice versa. The air starts to thin the higher altitude. The air starts to get colder–at that speed, our eyes couldn’t handle the high winds. Not to mention that humans are not birds–we are mammals, and IF we were to ever have a wing, it would not be an attractive feathered wing, like angels or birds have. Truth is, we’re closer to the bat that we are to the bird, so we would have a skin wing, which many view as unsightly.
Even so. Even if you would prefer a skin wing, attacting one by means of surgery would prove difficult. We have no knowledge of how to attatch one–unlike persay, a leg or an arm. We know the muscles there and have reattatched one in the past. We know the muscles and how they function. But a limb on the back is not so easy.
Okay, so say we grow a wing suitable for flight and we somehow attatch it to a back. The probability that the brain will accept it is not very likely. This is slightly unrelated, but think about heart donors. You would have to find a perfect fit or else the body would reject it. If you attached it, the probability to be able to move it would be slim. Imagine if you dosed youself up on painkillers and attatched an arm to your back, even with a surgeon’s help. It would be no different as if you sewed a carrot to your back. Eventually it would probably rot, as there would be no blood flow or circulation, not to mention that it would be painful to you.
I read in some article for creating cosmetic wings that they would stretch back skin into a frame. Even so, they would only be cosmetic, unable to tuck under a shirt at all. They would be skin.
If you wanted to create a wing, my guess would be through a design in technology, like a suit. I doubt you could get the wings to move, but who knows? They made a pair of fake cat ears that moved to brain sensors, so I suppose it’s possible.
Don’t expect to earn wings in your lifetime. Instead, try researching for the next generation. Do it for the gain of others, because God knows they’ll be others who want to fly. Set the pace.

I am with you, Time To Change. Why stop at wings? Why not go ahead and play god?! I am half-half on this issue. We can change, possibly save the environment while doing it. I mean, wings= no cars or planes & gills+webbed fingers= no boats or submarines or anything like that. Rid the world of energy drinks with highly concentrated photosynthesis skin. Chop down less trees, use less electricity.

But there is another issue. As I said before, doing all this would be playing god. if humans needed wings, we would have evolved with them. We don`t NEED all this, but if we had it, we could save the Earth. All we need to do is do it in a ethical fashion.

We are just too lazy to do anything. If we had wings, we would still use cars and planes because who wants to fly for hours over the ocean? It’s exhausting. People have the ability to walk everywhere, but they don’t. They drive to places that are only 5 minutes away.A large portion of the population is obese. They could never fly, and they are the people who drive around the most. Evolution-wise, we no longer need anything because we make everything for ourselves. Machines do everything we need. We are already playing god if you think of it that way. The most exciting new thing we’ll evolve is to get rid of a whole bunch of vestigial organs (wisdom teeth, pinky toes, appendixes, etc).

There is scientific evidence proving we didn’t have wings. Humans haven’t been around long enough for our skeletons to disappear by becoming oil like some of the oldest dinosaur bones, so we would have found a skeleton by now. Also the structure of our class and order makes it scientifically impossible for us to naturally be born with more than 4 limbs. And no skeletons have been found where wings replace arms. The webbed fingers are merely a genetic mutation, usually from inbreeding.

we shuld have wings i just read “nevermore” the last of the maximum ride series and if we were like them then we could survive an apocolypse- sorry if i cant spell if any1 needs a young guinea pig email me at chicahomegurl@yahoo.com

This isn’t a ‘tough Earth’ everywhere though… Maybe for some people living in third world countries, but nothing is equal. Even if there was an apocalypse of some sort, there would still be some people that find a way to be better off than others.

And the bigger the bird, the more energy it uses to fly. Even soaring birds use a tremendous amount of energy to take off. And travelling to another country by flying there would be even more exhausting if you were carrying all your stuff. Most people don’t go to other countries without packing some ‘essentials’.

It depends on where you are going and how long you are staying there. If you are going somewhere cold, you need lots of warm clothes, and if you are staying for a long time, you need more than just a backpack of food. You might need a tent, and other supplies like that. Not all people travel to 5 star resorts where they won’t need to bring much. Some people go backpacking around the world. And you would be surprised at how much a backpack with supplies could weigh. People are already very heavy, so a backpack full of stuff may just be the tipping point. Many birds of prey struggle just to carry the rodent they caught.

If you think all you need is the clothes on your back and a backpack of food, you obviously have never traveled before. It sounds like you’re getting your info from a certain series of books that everyone on here seems to adore.

And to add to what Hirondelle said, some birds can’t even fly until after digesting because they are too heavy with a single meal in their stomach.

Not necessarily. See i for example could never fly. I have a disease that will take me to the death bed. Unless of course a cure pops out fo nowhere and i will actually be able to live a life longer than 40 years. But now I am 13 years of age and grafting wings on ones back is pureley fiction. Our science is not capable of just filling them with the same bloodtype and letting our circulation system do the trick. If this was possible do you not think that amputees would no longerbe amputees? And I do know about the artificial organs. But even witht his you would have to tote around pills that you take daily so your body does not reject the extra limbs. Even if we somehow do managaer to surgically secure a pair on our backs we would most likely never be able to control them. Our nerves woul never connect properly and not to mention what we would do in the case that nerve damage could be caused to the already ‘you’ part? Then you also would not be able to fly and you will also lose the power to walk. So what does this leave us with? A severley nerve damages person, who is now paralized, with rotting grafted wings on their back, and perhaps even an infection. I have some theories of my own, but even I still need to ‘work out the bugs’.

You won’t live past 40 years? That’s fascinating! Do you have Huntington’s disease? That’s the only incurable disease I can think of off the top of my head that stops life at 40. Also, who are you replying to/arguing with? The only even remotely plausible way wings would work is with DNA alteration in utero or something purely bionic.

If they can`t fly straight away, you`d have to wait. And to add to my previous comment, you`d need, money, to buy food, the small pack is just for snacks. Maybe a light weight sway and a change of clothes.

It also depends on where you are travelling. If you went to Africa for example, you would need lots of food and way to sterilize your water, a mosquito net canopy to keep out deadly malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and some antibiotic medicine to keep you safe from malaria during the day. You would need a way to protect yourself from the flora and fauna there (flying into a tree wouldn’t save you, leopards live in trees and are very good climbers), and you can’t stay in the air forever, especially with the lack of food (flying takes up an ineffable amount of energy, so you would have to eat twice as much as a normal person)! People aren’t just going to take care of you and give you things. And that’s just Africa! Flying over the ocean can be very cold and even going somewhere warm like a desert can go down to freezing temperatures at night! There are many things you would need and money isn’t going to be helpful in a country with a different currency.

What if we were able to decrease our body weight, through “natural selection” but forced, then as medical science developes we could graph wings on our backs, connect them to our nerves and muscles. Then do you think we would be able to fly? Maybe not in our generation, or the next. But some day.

You do realize that natural selection involves all those containing undesirable genetics dying, right? No one’s going to go out there and kill all the fat people just so the skinny people can have wings.

Think about it we wont need cars then we wont have as much toxins in are earth + we can have to choice of bat wings light angel wings and dark angel wing and if we can connect the wings to are wing bones it could just possibly work amagin what ells we can accomplish as humans/birds, human/bats,& human/insects

As for the birds I am not entirely sure what other effects might come along with possibly but improbably developing wings we could find ourselves completely dying out from a crazy pathogen that only infects birds but is now open to humans. Bats not a good idea other than the wing structure which provides more room and take up less space, but we would be more likely be stumbling around blind trying to feel each others vibrations that aren’t their. But being part insect is a marvelous idea if we could strip and insert part of their genetic code and intertwine it with ours our vision would be increased more than 300% and we would be virtually immune to all know diseases and sicknesses. But this could also effect our life span. The average fly only lives to about 3 days. Your ideas are absolutely fascinating. Picture in your head- A human completely capable of walking on their own two legs supporting a massive 20 foot wingspan with a more than perfect vision- could see half way across the ocean, and hear people talking in whispers in another continent. Could smell a pizza place from 80 miles downstream, swim and run endless kilometers, slice off own limbs and regrow them in seconds. Breath underwater, and at pressures as great as the bottom of the ocean, and as high as Mt. Everest. Someone who could jump from Mt. Kilimanjaro free fall until they are feet from the ground and snap out their wings to soar back to the top and do it again. We could live until we are a thousand years old. Breath in outer space, conserve ourselves like mummies for centuries.
Animals could do it why not us?

Ok, so I haven’t been on here in a while, but it seems like I need to clear some things up. The problem with mixing our DNA with that of a bird it not that we will be susceptible to some new pathogen that used to only affect birds (since humans and birds transmit diseases to one another all the time), it’s that there won’t be any viable embryos! Even when mixing two mutations in *one* species of animal (example, Manx cats), there can be an allele for lethality. Which means the zygote will die! It will not survive long enough to be born and contract some pathogen!

Bats *are* a better idea because at least they are mammals like us. Also, bats aren’t blind!!! Their vision is as good as any human’s. They only use echolocation because they can’t see in the DARK, (which is when they hunt for food), just like humans, and just like most diurnal birds.

There are thousands of different insects, which are all significantly genetically different from humans! Birds are closer to us than insects are! There are also millions of genes with multiple alleles that affect traits, so tracking down the right sections of DNA would be nearly impossible. The human genome isn’t even fully mapped out yet, let alone any other organism. You mention dozens of ‘abilities’ we could have but all those things are for different insects. Even combining oneself with just ONE insect would be difficult enough! Also, bugs can do what they do in part because of their small size, once those abilities are applied to humans, they will be rendered useless birth defects.

I’m also going to add that the genetics aren’t the only issue with having insect wings. Do you people know what insect wings are made of? Membrane! TOUCHING them can break them! And with the size they’d have to be (insect wings are several times the size of the insects themselves – just think of butterflies and dragonflies!) they’d be touching stuff, believe me.

If yall all want wings that bad yall should all get together and make some and then give me a call cuz i want some to. but what if people came after you like in maxium ride book series that would be scary. and if your expirements failed when you tried it on an infant wouldnt you feel bad

“Trying it on an infant” would be unethical and illegal, so I have no idea where one would get a random baby to experiment on. You can’t change the genetic makeup of something that has already been born. Of course you could work with something that hasn’t been born yet, or even conceived! Start out small with mice in utero. Our best bet is to just design a contraption similar to a hang glider but more accessible (if we could grow wings on our backs, we would be gliding/soaring anyways, due to our weight).

But if you try it on an human embreo take the birds DNA and separate it you would need the wing and the hollowed bones part of the DNA and add it to the human DNA in all the right parts so basically you would be taking apart both human and bird DNA and pieceing it all back together then let it grow that way but you would have to do it before the embreo stage so the wings will become part of the person and its bone structure.

among various issues, one of the main ones is that the embryo (when a fully grown adult (assuming female)), the eggs would need to fertilize outside of the body because the human body isn’t designed to grow a solid egg inside, meanwhile the avian DNA is required to produce the egg with limited resources that are consumed throughout the stages of being an embryo to being a baby, also with more human genetics added to the batch, the genetic makeup would become unbalanced and the second generation child will most likely die or become so heavily disabled that it would be a mercy-killing. otherwise you’d eventually have an issue that the Inuit suffer from: a limited genetic pool creates a huge problem of inbreeding that make it unlikely for a baby to become a lifeform without severe messing around with the genetic structure

The solution to this is to have it developed just like a normal humans would, except it would be near impossible to have a natural birth. But even more likely the mixed human and avian DNA would render the person infertile.

Everything is controlled by genes and alleles which code for proteins/enzymes. Figure out which genes control what in both birds/bats and humans, and you will eventually figure it out. Of course that doesn’t mean the product will survive. Work with recombinant DNA is tricky, and usually only works with members of the same species, or similar species. We would have more luck with bats than with birds.

Hahaha, I thought the same thing when I saw the comments you’d put! Sad thing is, I’m probably younger than a good portion of the people on here. Most of the things I see make me want to facepalm. Actually, I usually do.

DNA doesn’t really reproduce… It’s located in the form of chromatin in the nucleolus of the nucleus of the somatic cells of an organism. When the cell undergoes mitosis, it replicates its DNA (using RNA) to create two identical cells. Meiosis is the one that has the crossing over of the sister chromatids (which are homologous pairs of chromosomes). If the chromosomes didn’t match up, neither would the chromatids (it wouldn’t even get that far!) and the gamete wouldn’t even be created. Or it would result in some chromosomal disorder (like trisomy 21).

Another problem is that not only do birds have a different number of autosomes than we do (and even if they had the same number, they would carry different genes, different alleles, and be different sizes), they also have completely different sex chromosomes. Female mammals have two X chromosomes, while male mammals have an X and a Y chromosome. With birds, it’s vice versa. Females have a Z and a W (X and Y), while males have two Z’s (X and X).

i want to go as far as humanly possible with this! i have already considered need for extra organs such as an extra pair of lungs, an extra stomach for the energy, doubling length of the intestines to make digestion -> energy more efficient, also a very specific diet needed to maximize efficiency, an extra liver for more blood AND a heart with two or even three times the strength of a human heart, not to mention a specially designed space suit recently made that can aid a trained pilot withstand up to 11x gravity and stay alive while a trained pilot can only withstand 3x gravity as well as the fact that the human body wasn’t designed to hold extra organs- so i was thinking some way to expand the human body, but this could do as much as DOUBLE the weight, and if the preferred theory is correct, with the extra body mass and the extra muscle mass, a wingspan of approximately 30 feet should be enough for a healthy grown man of considerable strength.

While most of those are relatively good points (they could be useful), some of them are a bit off. For example, extra bones (or bone marrow, anyway) would create more blood, not an extra liver, which would just aid detoxification of your food. Also, we’d then need extra veins to allow for said extra blood. Along with that, an intestine twice as long wouldn’t make digestion more efficient; it would just make it more thorough.

Remember that man who had a body-covering growth that made him look like a tree? Tree man. Did a lumber or fertilizer company or tree organization adopt him as their mascot, giving him a lifetime job? No. He lost his job and had to get by as a freak show by having people smash fluorescent lights on him. And he didn’t even attract that many people.

Another example is the Fiji mermaid. Most people thought it was a hoax, which it was, but even when people believed it, they didn’t think much of it. Crazy people will always have a crazed reaction to these sort of things, and just like the crazy people who commented above about secret government experiments, if you had wings, those same crazy people would probably think you were a result of those experiments, or an alien, or an angel, and so on.

Scientists and religious people would probably be more interested in you, since this abnormality would be abnormal even as abnormalities go. But again, believe it or not, it’s still not going to be as big a deal as you might think. Even with wings, and flight, you’d still have to deal with legal issues, would probably lose your job, and you wouldn’t become rich or famous overnight. There are many ways to get rich and famous without wings. Look at Google, or Facebook, or that guy that got paid to wear T-shirts. Having wings could easily leave you in poverty like the Tree Man or it could make you a celebrity, it just depends on what do you. Somewhere in the middle would be selling your feathers for maybe $50 and up a feather, just for some extra money on the side. Personally, I wouldn’t buy one, but I’m sure others would.

As for you crazies that wish you were an animal or think that the government is hiding bird people in secret labs, having wings isn’t going to solve any of your personal problems. At most, all we can do right now is basic cloning and organ growing, and both of those are limited because of legal, ethical, and financial reasons. Human-animal combinations will probably not be possible in our lifetimes, and will probably never be socially acceptable.

I don’t think people want wings just to be famous or to solve personal problems…. I think they want them for aesthetic reasons or as a new mode of locomotion. I personally wouldn’t mind some for the transportation aspect. If you’ve ever been hang gliding you’ll know how amazing it feels to be soaring up in the sky. As for the showing off aspect you keep mentioning, I’m very introverted and I wouldn’t even want people to know I had wings if I did have them since I really don’t like drawing attention to myself and I’m sure many others feel the same way. Most people probably don’t care what society thinks of them, and you would also be surprised how popular wings are in many cultures, so I feel that having wings would be more socially acceptable than other defects.

With the state of the economy these days most completely normal people can’t even find jobs, so I’m sure it wouldn’t make much of a difference if you had wings.

People-animal combinations will most likely never be possible, and if they ever were, those hybrids would be infertile so a race of flying people could never be naturally created. Also if wings were ever possible for humans, they would most likely be bat wings if anything, since humans and bats evolved from a common ancestor.

i don’t care about publicity or about money, what i want is to wake up on a hot summer morning and warm my feathered wings in the bright sun, i want to fly and feel the wind on my face as it conflicts with the sunlight that would by then be almost hurting my wings. it’s not about fame or glory, it’s about releasing a part of me that shouldn’t exist. i want to fly for the feeling of flying.

We humans have abilities too you know. We should use what we were born with. So what if we can’t fly, or run a 100 mph, that is all fake any way. Lets think on what we do have and what each individual is talented in, and in what area. And strengthen our strong points that we were born to do. If each person would do this, we would be able to do something really awesome. And believe me, I use to want something that made me special too, like having wings. But now I realize all that time wishing just made me more weak, and not even knowing my true gift right under my nose…
Whats yours? We don”t have to be freaks to feel special or to be able to do something awesome.

You’ve got a point. I think because we humans are highly intellectual and aren’t really for laborious activities, say hanging from trees, staying underwater for long hours, or fly. Early humans would rather set up traps than patiently wait and chase their preys like other animals. Hence, we evolved into more fragile form.

Thank you for some other informative blog. The place else may just I get that kind of info written in such an ideal way? I have a mission that I’m simply now working on, and I’ve been at the look out for such information.

I have a great addition to this: There are some people who have a sort of evolution thing going on with their muscles. Humans naturally don’t use a very large amount of the individual ‘fibers’ of muscles. There are certain humans that can withstand large amounts of pressure ( a semi truck) upon weak spots (abdominals) for a short amount of time. Now, imagine a sort of medicine or other that could permanently allow our body to use all of our fibers within the given muscles. We would have an incredible amount of strength!
Here is a prime example:
You should watch the entire thing, but the good information starts around 4:00

Just popping by. I read a few comments up, and decide to in out and obvious problem.

You guys all want wings, right? Well, shouldn’t you be working on grafting instead of genetic engineering? I mean, I’m not saying don’t work on genetic engineering as well, but for your own personal wings, maybe you should concertrate on grafting. (Apparently science is pretty close to major grafting techniques)

Also, concerning those who may want to try genetic engineering anyway: some changes you’d have to make.
The human body is incrediably complex to let us just do all the things we do daily: talk, eat (digest), walk & run, etc. Adding wings you’d have to change many things, including muscle sturcture/density (make stronger, especially in the back, stomach & arms), leg… withstandal (if dropping down hard on the ground as a landing), organs (withstand thin air, make enough energy to power wings, etc) & bones (lighter/hollow, but not so much that our muscle & organ weight would crush them or they would be to weak to move). Thats just a few!

Sorry if I annoyed anyone or anything, just wanted to point a few things out. Bye!

Hi there! I realize this is somewhat off-topic but I had to
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I think that if they made it into something a human can grow straight out of the back it is possible to give a human wings and the ability to fly. They know how to make a human grow horns so take the right genes and mix them and suddenly you got wings, in theory.

Ok, I admit it, It would be really cool if we could fly. BUT is everyone here CRAZY!! I have read a lot of ur guy’s comments, and I now think your all nuts. Really? You are talking back and forth on how a mad crazy scientist can officially screw people up? That’s like saying, “oh, I wish I was born with four arms and be a freak.” I mean we are humans, and I think we should be proud of our race. I want to use what I was born with. And I don’t want to use steroids or drugs that harm my body, to enhance how fast I can run etc. Taking drugs and letting the government cut you up where you can maybe fly ( Gross ) are synonyms. And if you don’t know what that word means maybe you should stop reading so many Maximum Ride books and do something real like school so you can be someone real. I mean really guy’s. Stop trying to catch fairies and do something real with your talents, that make you who you are. You can be great without being a freak.

…Okay then. I don’t think you really know what a synonym is. Don’t try to be a smart-ass, especially if you can’t even spell properly. Not everyone on here is serious. True, there are some retards, and people who are delusional, but some people on here know it won’t happen. Speculation isn’t a bad thing. A lot of people here are discussing science, and plausible hypotheses about genetic modification (which is currently quite real). They aren’t talking about fantasy. True, the goal is not possible (at the moment anyways), but dedicating your life to science certainly isn’t a waste.

If you don’t believe me try to Google the word synonym and it will tell you all about it. That just proves you don’t really know how to spell. Anyways first of all why is everyone wasting their time with something you know won’t happen? second, I think science is awesome and cool. But when you go into the kind of science were people are talking about genetic modification ( which I know IS quite real ) and mixing genes, pumping it into someone, and then pow! A whole new human! That to put it simple is wrong! Most scientist now days are trying to take the role as god! That, is going to far…

I know what a synonym is. “Taking drugs and letting the government cut you up” are not synonymous. What proves I don’t know how to spell? Definitions and spelling are different things, and I neither defined anything (incorrectly or otherwise) nor made any spelling mistakes. I’m studying genetics at one of the top scientific universities in Canada, and it’s obvious that you don’t know much about genetic modification. It’s not applied to humans, you can’t just “mix genes together” and put them into people to create new humans. It’s not nearly that simple. But genetic modification IS natural; it’s called cancer, so part of studying genetic modification is to figure out how to cure ailments that attack the genetic material of organisms. Our genes are altered naturally in beneficial ways as well. The study of it is called epigenetics. It’s nothing like “playing god”. We alter the genetic makeup of fruits and livestock on the daily and no one complains about big, seedless, juicy fruits.

Wow. Look here guy’s, we have Mr. Smartypants online. First of all when I said “mix genes together” I was being sarcastic. What are you? A robot that was put together or something? Anyway to keep it simple I think we should let everything just be natural and stop messing with stuff. The way things were before people got their hands on everything. Like the farmers spraying poison ( that they created ) on their fields to get more produce. After they do that, the land is dead. Nothing can grow again without that poison in the land. Yes, like drugs do to people.

As opposed to a robot that WASN’T put together. Anyway, if things were still as they were before, there wouldn’t be nearly enough food to go around, especially in places like Bangladesh and India that are immensely overpopulated and low on resources. Admittedly, the pesticides/herbicides weren’t the best idea, but it definitely would have seemed like it at the time. And it wasn’t to get more produce, it was to stop the plants they had from getting killed. It worked, too, for years.

How could that have been sarcasm? If you were being sarcastic, then it would mean that you don’t agree with your own argument. Just for future reference, don’t use sarcasm on the Internet (and don’t try to defend your mistakes by incorrectly stating that you were using sarcasm) since it’s all about tone, and no one can hear the tone in your voice online. And now you’re using fallacies in your argument (belittling others with your remark about robots and trying to insult me by calling me smart, which I’m sure was said in a sarcastic tone) since you can’t actually flaw my argument. So you want people to stop trying to find a cure for cancer? A synonym is a word or phrase meaning the same thing as another word or phrase (like how happy and joyful are synonymous), so technically the act of being cut up and the act of taking drugs aren’t synonymous. Drugs don’t render people empty wastelands like salt does to healthy soil, most drugs are chemicals that are already found in the body naturally. People who can’t process/produce insulin need it given to them in drug form to survive living with diabetes. Steroids, drugs that do alter muscle growth and such, are also found in the body naturally (they’re testosterone and estrogen), and some people actually have disorders where their steroid levels are too low, so again, they need drugs to survive. I agree that humans have messed with the earth a little too much and as Douglas Adams wrote, “The story so far:
In the beginning, the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move” but now that we’ve come this far, we might as well continue with science. If we learn how things work, we can learn how to fix them, including how to restore life to barren ground. Other animals besides humans also have a large affect on their environment and often destroy it to some degree. But life goes on.

All I originally was just trying to say is that people should not harm the earth or people. Finding a cure for cancer is what I meant when I said a comment or so back “Science is awesome and cool.” Some times people can be so smart their dumb. If you think more simply you can actually find the answer to a lot of things. And the only reason I got upset and called you “Smart” was because that is how you really were acting, so it got me upset. So sorry I said that ( even though it was true ). And Just for future reference, I was not being sarcastic just because I could not ” flaw your argument”. You really have to stop assuming your right ALL the time. You must think a lot of yourself.

So being smart is a bad thing now? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with knowing how things actually work. There’s a difference between thinking simply, as you put it, and being ignorant. I’m not over thinking things. This is pretty simple stuff. If I wanted to “act smart”, I would. Right now, I’m talking about pretty basic things. My intelligence is not an act. It’s weird that you get upset at people for being smart… I don’t assume I’m right, but when it comes to facts about genetics, I know I’m right. I’ve been studying it for years. An like many intelligent people, I have severe clinical depression, so no, I don’t think very highly of myself. This isn’t about me, it’s about scientific fact. What I think of myself has nothing to do with the facts I’m stating. I’m not upset about being called smart, just appalled by the fact that you’re using intelligence as an insult. Generally people get defensive and start insulting others instead of using facts when they’re losing the argument.

What about bionic composite wings that attach to your back for electrical control from your brain only, but the wings themselves provide the power for flight. Like a doc Oc crossed with archangel after he messed up and cut his real wings off like an idiot. I think cyborg wings will be a closer reality than genetically modifying humans for flight. Any doctor attempting that would be considered a quack…

You mean like a battery in the wing? Hm. The material would have to be extremely lightweight, and the wing mechanisms would need to be as efficient as possible. I’m no scientist, so I’m not sure if the power source being in the wing would be a problem or not, but it sounds plausible.

You know what Hirondelle, I am going to be the big one here and stop the so called argument right now. I am not going to wast my time talking to you any more. I tried to be nice and end it, but you are the one wanting to argue. All I simply said was I just think people should not harm people or the earth with their technology now days. Do you not agree? And believe it or not, you still find something to argue to me about that. I don’t care if you are the smartest person on the whole planet. You still put you pants on the same way I do.

Running away doesn’t make you a bigger person, but I agree wholeheartedly that this should end as I’m not enjoying it and I don’t have very reliable wifi service since I’m volunteering in Thailand to help elephants for over a month.

I really want to fly. please contact me when research has been done and human wings have been created. and yes i would definetly replace my hands for wings when its possible. if you want to see what its like to be a bird and fly download flylikeabirdthreelite and its the best game ever. bye!

Actually, I think you’re all taking the wrong approach to this situation. We don’t have to go into such electrical complexities as neural prosthetics to make functional wings (even though the mind control factor could be cool/advantageous). In one of the first comments, it was mentioned that 20 sq feet of space was needed for a 170 lb human to fly. That’s just 10 feet of 2 foot width wings, about a fourth of your average hang glider. Also, with the creative use of bungee cords, we wouldn’t need to have giant pectoral muscles. Say we had 31 foot long wings, 15 feet per wing, 1 foot for the attachment to the torso. The wings could be made to telescope out/in, and to fold down, reducing the inconvenience of carrying around 31 foot wings into the convenience of having 3 sections of 5 foot telescoping parts, one for each wing. Then those could fold down, while being attached to the main torso piece, allowing us to have a wing ‘pack’ that would only be about 5 1/2 feet long by about 2 feet wide. Plus, with the wings fully extended, there could be bungee cords, or something that does the same job, that could do all the work of keeping the wings up. That way the effort would be drastically lowered for flapping. Plus, if hinges are used for the wings, and used correctly, then the wings wouldn’t fold back on you and break your arms, because the mechanical aspects of the hinges wouldn’t allow it. Also, the part where the wings are attached to the main torso piece could be angled, allowing for a more powerful and effective flap. This description may not be so great, but I made a schematic of this in the 9th grade, it looks much better on paper. Plus, let’s back up a second… Who really wants wings to be a permanent thing? Wouldn’t it be better to not have to give up your hands, let alone your arms, and have convenient, detachable wings? How did we jump to the conclusion that we needed to meld our arms into this? With this design, you flap with your arms while holding handles that are attached to cables that run to the tips of the ends of the wings, making it easy to flap, thanks to the bungee cords.

Well, in theory if you awoken certain dormant genes in human DNA, you would be able to make a more bird-like human. This of course is not possible for any current humans considering it would require your DNA to be rewritten, and human experimentation is wrong and illegal. Though I suppose if one had no morals they could achieve creating a human with wings. Personally, I’m more interested in the possibility of attaching electronic wires to severed nerves to create almost perfectly functioning prosthetics (Though, they’d be quite a bit heavier.) If anyone would like to discuss theories, please, don’t hesitate to follow up.

By the year 2025, power assisted wings modeled on bat flight will become a reality. Robotics will be the technology that overcomes the human physical limitations in this regard. The first users will likely be double leg amputees with massive pecs, biceps and triceps due to their light weight and upper body strength. No shortage of candidates at places like Walter Reed Army Hospital, unfortunately, although depending how you look at it…

I am 14 and u have been dreaming of having wing for as long as I can remember. I have read many websites like these, and one comment had stuck out to me. Someone said if you would take bird DNA and inject it into your back muscles then you would grow wings. First of all, I support this idea, but in different ways. If you did inject the DNA into yourself, and your body accepted it, what’s to say you will grow wings? You could grow a beak or talons. You would have to research exactly which aspects in Avian DNA dealt with wings, and combine that with our own. And you would also have to find a way to make sure the wings grow on your back. But if anybody ever does find a way to do this, contact me. I have cried over having wings for so long and it would be a dream come true. Thanks,

Passive flying…. or active? Whe never had the dream of flying… Maybe I saw a flying squirrel or whatever. Long bevor I saw a wingsuit I thought “a suit making a flying Membrane between arms / body / legs and between legs may do a lot”. And clearly I’d dream that there is a biological solution for that. Skin, filled with nerves to feel the air, some strong fibrous tissue and muscles between hands and ankles, spreading also to the neck (more muscles than usual to keep the whole system stable), more Skin stretching between the ankles, even Skin between the fingers for better control. Using every squarecentimeter of the body. This might be enough to land w/o a parachute. Gliding fast, like a flying squirrel, flying with strong updrafts. That needs quite some physical power, but the load is spreaded between the legs and the arms and the central body surface itself. The sports technology starts to get seriously CLOSE. The suit area is increasing. the form slowly optimizing, the Jumpers learning to fly better and better, doing hard g forcs but precise movements which seemed to be impossible 2, 3 years ago. When the frst one is landing succdessfully wothout aid (with no more than a runway of Card boxes it worked already). If you could feel the air… if you would have nerves and muscles in that Membrane… that would help a lot.
Ok, you could not move or arms higher than the shoulder. Ok you might not be able to walk with bigger steps then 3, 4 feet. But this…. is minor. You can glide through the air. Passive flying. With training… that should be possible for extended periods (e.g. while beeing pushed by small engines).
Bionics is far away… but sports industry is THAT CLOSE. Ist more true fact than dream already.

ACTIVE flying is different. That Needs wingspan of a Pterosour (like a small plane). Even if an additional pair of limbs would do that, this behemots would fold up to something really heavy – and still bulky in your back. That would massivele alter daily live!!! And These new limbs would Need a lot of energy. Oh overweight would never be a Problem again, you would have hard times to eat enough. Having a.) strong legs to run fast, b.) a large brain to think fast, and c.) those king of pterosour wings… that would be a hard time for your energy balance… It might be possible, but hard. And you could not fold them like Angel of X-men, they would disturb a lot.

If possible (once?) I’d go for flying membranes and passive flight (hoping to buy some small engine to push).

if you genetically modify human muscles to be more like cardiac and hand muscles with the ability to grow rapidly but still maintain about the same size and then have it naturally densify whenever it does grow rather than having it be treat like a bicep or quadriceps you wouldn’t gain very much mass in fact you would lose quite a lot of mass if you were going to remain at your current strength but say you took a gymnast who could do a cross then modified all of his tissue he would be able to fly easily then you don’t just hollow out the bones but rather have them replace themselves with a natural silicate and create a sort of helium sac that could pump helium into the bones by the same process that we pump air in just a different substance than iron. then you have a bunch of joints in the wings with muscles that can bring the membranes in on the bones like a flying squirrel have the wing width be 3 feet when fully extended and the length be 8 to twelve. and favor shorter people (like myself at 5’4″ instead of the taller and out dated nordic type at 6′ or above, a heavily muscled person with those large wings at my height would be about 160lbs without bone modification) also you could start to modify all the other muscles in the body to act in the same way and have veins and arteries become smooth muscle for high and low(underwater) altitudes then we’d have to find an area for a water sack for underwater breathing. wings would be a great advantage in an underwater environment for a human for swimming. and you would have to add in a third hole and a reflexive part in our brain stem to close off the other two parts of our larynx when we weren’t drinking water but rather breathing it. I think overtime people would be n norm 4’5″ to 5’5″ and that we would become more lithe and much more suited to underwater and aerial travel. not to mention the effects it would have on our brains our cerebellum would grow to the size of or cortices and our cortices would fold in on themselves a thousands thousand times more our brain-stem would probably remain about the same or even shrink to make room for our now gigantic higher function brain and if we modified the brain genetically to act like a cardiac muscle that actually shrinks the stronger it gets so that it can maintain the same size and engineered it to all function then add in some spare parts as a culture(cybernetic implants) we would have telekinesis, massive memory and processing power, extreme amounts of creativity and wisdom, nobody would have hearing problems or sight problems in fact they would both increase for everyone. and if you unlocked our bodies to actually work like animals do using every single neural transmitter/ using every muscle(myo-neural transmiter) it would be a lot of genetic modification and would probably take either a couple generations or some really intense modification all at once then you have this problem of the generation that was already born you’d have to modify there genetics and send everybody through this rehab type thing and probably even some body modification unless we reached the stage before we could do this where we could take thoughts and memories and implant them into another body. the underwater part might not apply to avian humans but might as well right messing with genetics anyway.

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I can imagine wings being on our backs big enough and light enough to fly with no problem. Either being genetically or surgically enhanced. For example creating a big enough wing for a human and attaching it to the back (with veins and all that good stuff attached to the spinal cord and nervous system so the brain can control it on its own).

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I’m interested in building a set of wings and I’m not really sure what to do for them and I was wondering if anyone of a higher education could answer a few questions for me. What fabric should I use for the wings? What material should I use for the skeleton/frame of the wings? How big should the wingspan be, I am 6′ and 140lbs. I understand that the pectoral muscles if the human body aren’t powerful enough to generate lift and sustain long term flight, but what If i built some sort of exoskeleton that attached to my torso and arms and was capable of enhancing my performance and generating the lift that was necessary would I then be able to fly effectively for a relatively long distance? If someone could talk with me about this sort of project and the cost it would be greatly appreciated I’m genuinely interested in this human-birdwings project but currently don’t have the knowledge and would love some help my email is MirkoVosk@yahoo.com if you think you can help me feel free to email me and I will try to get back with you so we can talk about this.

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OK while everyone was busy replying to this, has anyone thought about the concept of the ways bees fly. Now if or when someone finds the secret of how bees fly maybe they could use the same principle but on humans. I know for a fact that there is no such thing as a clean human i.e clean blood or clean DNA. Here’s a deeper explanation, almost every person on this whole planet has a mutation in their DNA, now if multiple mutations appear in one place we would normally call that cancer. If that was a virus it would infect all the blood cells, back to the mutation, If the first mutation appeared with a code that specifically made people grow wings we would then have to manipulate it, so it would grow where it should be. The subject everyone is talking about is cross species genetic mutation, and for that to happen you would need DNA of a bird that is closely related to humans with the right blood type (birds have wings instead of arms and the bone structure is hollow), then you would need as many limbs as a spider, because I’m sure everyone wants arms and wings. Then the muscles of a bee simply because the reason that bees can fly is that their muscle structure allows the to create lift and therefore can fly. Now assuming you have all of these specific DNA strands you would need to place them appropriately.Word of caution if you plan on attempting this please consider the danger, and that is combining your DNA with other species, allowing one creatures DNA in yourself could lead to self harm or danger to others around you. Simply putting your own DNA may not be as strong as any of the species I’ve just talked about, but the thought of all three combined inside you could end up with an abomination or worse DEATH. In fact death would be the humane thing to do as your very mind could be gone due to this procedure. PLEASE DON’T DO IT (unless you know for sure its 99.999999% sure its safe to go through)

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Everybody listen up please, im currently studying it and everything and in a couple of years it would be very helpful if i could have some patients to do the project on at first you may not be ale to fly but im looking in to it you may have to get ALOT of surgery but if your willing to one day contact me in two years perhaps be patient and i promise itll be worth it

Well in order to have wings, we would technically need “four arms”, if you know what I mean. If we combined bird DNA with a human’s DNA, you would need four “arms” to have both wings and arms, since arms and wings are very similar. It is more realistic to have your arms switched out for your wings, but then again, who wants that? I want to fly too, but if the best thing they can do for me is attach wings on my back and connect it to my nervous system so I can flap them on the ground for decoration, oh lord I would still get them even if they’re useless. As long as I can move them. I would gladly be a test subject for that, or any related topic to attaining wings. I want wings so bad I could cry and pout for years! BTW I’m 14 and I am dying for wings.

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Possible to fly….We need and can get strong enough materials made today advance lightweight materials. Also yes to develop stronger elongated muscles not heavy but strong . I believe anything is possible you just have to have the dream…..remember one time someone had said it was impossible
to reach the moon now we are going for the stars !!!..